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Copyright January, 1913, by 

THE SISTERS OF MERCY 

Wilkes-Barrfi, Pennsylvania 



Raeder Publishing Company 
Wilkes-BarrS, Pa. 



©CI.A343614 



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"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, 
And waste its sweetness on the desert ciir." 

To know and to realize are just a trifle less far apart 
than to know and not to know. The superb pictures so 
often painted against the oriental sky — framed by receding 
night and the horizon — just at the break of day, are well 
known but badly realized and consequently poorly appre- 
ciated. The exceptional one, who does realize, has an 
enraptured tingle shot through every fiber of his sentient 
being and every faculty of his soul. Admiration, reverence, 
praise and love of the Omnipotent Artist thrill the extremes 
of his nature. The one who knows only, rarely looks up 
a second time, and thus it comes that even the Master's 
work is held commonplace. Just a glance and nothing 
more. 

This phenomenon is urged in justification of the present 
book, "Cedar Chips," hacked from "Under the Cedars and 
the Stcirs" and "Parerga," by Canon Sheehan. The compiler 
claims no merit except that of new combinations which she, 
a student and teacher, hopes may attract a more adequate 
recognition to the originals. Efforts along this line may be 
applauded, too, in these days of Free Libraries, Circulating 
Libraries, Carnegie Libraries and the rest ; particularly, if one 
may pin one's faith to Emerson's dictum : " The Colleges 
furnish us no professors of books and I think no chair is so 
much needed." May this book find an honored place on 
the literary Signal Corps. Prosit ! 

JOHN J. McCABE. 

Wilkes-Barr6. Pa. 
January twentieth, nineteen thirteen 



The selections from " Under the Cedars 
and the Stars" and "Parerga" are used by 
permission of the author, Rev. P. A. Canon 
Sheehan, D. D., and the publishers, Messrs. 
Benziger, and Messrs. Longmans, Green, 
and Co., to whom 1 am indebted for this 
kindness. 

The Compiler. 



®o (§m Caiy of Mmi^ 



I "have been at a great feast and stolen 
the scraps." 

"Selections have their justification. TTiey 
serve a double object, — to introduce and 
to remind. They provide the unadventurous 
reader with the easiest way to learn a little 
of an author he feels he ought to know ; and 
they recall the fruits of fuller study to the 
memories of those who have passed on to 
other fields." 



Cedar Chips 



One 



What a wonderful camera is the mind ! The sen- 
sitized plate can only catch the material picture 
painted by the sunlight. The tabula rasa of the 
mind can build or paint its own pictures from the 
black letters of a book. Here is a little series that 
crossed the diorama of imagination this afternoon. 
A great bishop, reading his own condemnation from 
his pulpit, and setting fire with his own hand to a 
pile of his own books there upon the square of his 
cathedral at Cambrai ; and then constructing out of 
all his wealth a monstrance of gold, the foot of 
which was a model of his condemned book, which 
he thus placed under the feet of Christ, so that 
every time he gave Benediction, he proclaimed his 
own humiliation. 



Cedar Chips 



Number two picture is that of a great preacher 
of world-wide reputation, going down into the crypts 
of the cathedral that was still echoing with the 
thunders of his eloquence ; and whilst the enthusi- 
astic audience was filing from the doors, and every 
lip was murmuring : "Marvelous !" "Wonderful," 
"Unequalled," stripping himself bare and scourging 
his shoulders with the bitter discipline, until it be- 
came clogged with his blood, he murmuring, as each 
lash fell : "Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam 
misericordiam tuam." 



Cedar Chips ""»'** 



®I|p (£wtt of Ara 

Number three is that of a lowly village church 
hidden away from civilization in a low-lying valley 
in the south of France. It is crowded, it is always 
crowded, night and day ; and the air is thick with the 
respiration of hundreds of human beings, who linger 
and hover about the place, as if they could not tear 
themselves away. No wonder! There is a saint 
here. He is the attraction. It is evening. The An- 
gelus has just rung. And a pale, withered, shrunken 
figure emerges from the sacristy and stands at the 
altar rails. Insignificant, old, ignorant, his feeble 
voice scarcely reaches the front bench. There is 
seated an attentive listener, drinking in with avidity 
the words of this old parish priest. He is clothed in 
black and white. He is the mighty preacher of 
Notre Dame, and he sits, like a child, at the feet of 
M. Vianney. 



f°"' Cedar Chips 



UmnrnnaiB 

Number four is a lonely chateau, hidden deep in 
the woods of France, away from civilization. It has 
an only occupant — a lonely man. He wanders all 
day from room to room, troubled and ill at ease. 
His mind is a horrible burden to himself. He is a 
sufferer from a spiritual tetanus. He cannot say: 
Peccavi! nor Miserere! He comes to die. Prayers 
are said for him in every church and convent in 
France. The Sister of Charity by his bedside pre- 
sents the last hope — the crucifix. He turns aside 
from the saving mercy and dies — impenitent. Three 
days later, after he has been buried, like a beast, 
without rites, his brother arrives in haste. The 
rooms are empty. The dead sleep on. The despair- 
ing and broken-hearted priest rushes from chamber 
to chamber, wringing his hands and crying : Oh, mon 
f rere ! mon f rere ! 



Cedar Chips Five 

latent ^amtv nf tl|r 3?riratI|anJi 

It is said, the brute creation knows not its power. 
If it did, it might sweep man from the earth. The 
same is said of w^oman ; the same of the Moslem, in 
reference to European civilization ; the same of the 
Tartar hordes. Might we not without disrespect 
say : The Catholic priesthood knows not its power. 
If it did, all forms of error should go down before 
it. The concentrated force of so many thousand 
intellects, the pick and choice of each nation under 
heaven, the very flower of civilization, emancipated, 
too, from all domestic cares, and free to pursue in 
the domains of thought that subject for which each 
has the greatest aptitude, should bear down with its 
energy and impetuosity the tottering fabrics of 
human ingenuity or folly. Here, as in most other 
places, are hundreds who, freed from the drudgery 
of great cities, the mechanical grinding of daily 
and uninspiring work, are at liberty to devote them- 
selves to any or every branch of literature or 
science. They resemble nothing so much as the 
sentinels posted on far steppes on the outskirts of 
civilization, with no urgent duty except to keep 
watch and ward over tranquil^ because unpeopled, 
wastes ; and to answer, now and again from the 
guard on its rounds, the eternal question : "What 
of the night, watchman? Watchman, what of the 
night?" "Ay," saith someone, pursuing the simile, 
"but suppose the guard finds the sentinel with a 
book, not a musket, in his hands, what then?" Well, 
then, the student-sentinel is promptly court-mar- 
tialled and shot! 

And it was of these, sentinels of the West, that 
the very unjust and bigoted Mosheim wrote: 
"These Irish were lovers of learning, and distin- 
guished themselves in these times of ignorance by 
the culture of the sciences beyond all the European 
nations ; the first teachers of the scholastic philoso- 
phy in Europe, and who, so early as the eighth 
century, illustrated the doctrines of religion by the 
principles of philosophy." 



^" Cedar Chips 



Timanthes, unable to express the grief of Aga- 
memnon at the death of Ipphigenia, painted the 
father with head covered and face enveiled. And 
the sun, unable to bear the horror of the death of 
Nature, veils his face from us these short days of 
winter. Ay, indeed, they are dark days ! Just a 
kind of mournful twilight between the night and the 
night. And what is worse, it is a weeping twilight. 
We have no cold until January and February; but 
drip ! drip ! drip ! comes the rain all day long, flood- 
ing rivers, filling swamps, creating lakelets every- 
where ; and all night long it is the same soft swish 
of rain, rain, rain upon the roof, flooding the shoots 
beneath the eaves, dripping from the bare trees ; and 
you can hear the channels running flooded to the 
river, and see the swollen river sweeping noiselessly 
to the sea. Oh, but it is dreary, dreary, like the 
moated grange, and the "rusted nail, that held the 
pear to the garden wall." Yet these days, too, have 
their enjoyments. I confess I like a real, downright 
wet day. Not one that is rainy by fits and starts, so 
that you must go out and get muddy boots and drip- 
ping mackintosh ; but a day when the conduits of 
the sky are turned on fully, and the great sheets 
come down steadily, steadily, or beat in fitful gusts 
against your windows, and wash them clean ; and the 
most hopeful weather-prophet, scanning every quar- 
ter of the sky, cannot see the faintest break of white 
cloud to warrant him in presaging that, sooner or 
later, it will clear. We have plenty of these "cata- 
ract" days in Ireland ; and they are simply delightful. 



Cedar Chips 2^^*=° 



Slljftr Abuantagra 

Delightful ? Yes, to be sure. And first, you have 
the intense joy of unbroken solitude. You are alone 
— absolutely alone for a whole day ! The knocker 
is muffled ; the bell is silent. No foolish people who 
want to waste an hour on you, will venture forth to- 
day. Those who have real business to transact, will 
defer it. Then your conscience is at rest. If you do 
stir up the fragrant wood-fire, and watch the merry 
blazes dance up the deep chimney, and wheel over 
your armchair, and take up your latest purchase, 
crisp and clean from the publisher, or musty and 
stained from the second-hand "catalogue," there are 
no qualms about luxurious idleness ; no thought of 
that country-school to be visited, or that horrid scan- 
dal to be unearthed, or that grimy lane to be pa- 
trolled. You cannot go out — that is all about it! 
There, listen ! Swish go the cataracts ; patter, patter 
go the bullets of rain on your windows ! The whole 
landscape is blotted out in a mist of smoke ; gray 
sheets of water are steered across the fields and 
trees by the jealous wind; little jets of brown liquid 
are thrown up from the puddles in the streets where 
the rain-drops strike them. The channels are choked 
with the eager running of the streamlets from the 
streets ; the brown river sweeps majestically along. 
There is no use in trying. You cannot go out. 
Wheel your chair closer; watch for a moment, for 
the greater enjoyment, the desolation and death 
without. Then glance at the ruddy flame ; and, 
finally, bury yourself deep, deep in your book. No 
fear of interruption ; one, two, three hours pass by 
in that glorious interchange of ideas. Life has noth- 
ing better to offer you. Enjoy it while you may! 



E'8^' Cedar Chips 



How you would hate the miserable optimist, who, 
intruding on such sacred seclusion, would say with 
a knowing look : " 'Tis clearing away in the west ! 
There is a break down there behind the trees ; we 
will have a fine afternoon !" Imagine, a sickly, pal- 
lid winter sun looking down on such a wet, bedrag- 
gled landscape ; and, in unholy alliance with your 
conscience, ordering you away from that cheerful, 
neighborly fire ! And how you would bless the 
cheerful croaker, who, looking north, south, east 
and west, would shake his head sadly, and say : 
"No stirring abroad to-day! You wouldn't drive a 
dog from your door in such weather ! ! We shall 
have forty-eight hours' continuous rain!" Forty- 
eight hours! Think of it! Think of it! How we 
will poke in long-forgotten drawers, and look up old 
accounts, and see how extravagant we were in our 
heyday, and examine old diaries, and re-read cen- 
tury-old letters. There, you took them up by chance, 
and now, entranced, you sit on the edge of a chair, 
or on an open trunk, and read, read, till your eyes 
grow dim with fatigue, or — tears. Ah ! indeed, the 
letter, frayed and yellow, is almost falling to pieces in 
your hands. You hold it together with an effort. 



Cedar Chips Nine 



Letter by letter, the old familiar handwriting begins 
to dawn on you, and you read. It is all "dear" or 
"dearest," and "Surely you must have known that 
I never intended to hurt," and "Are you not over- 
sensitive, dear, and too prone to take offence?" and 
"Come over informally this evening, and let us for- 
get." You poise the letter in your fingers and try 
to remember. Yes ! you wrote a dignified and very 
cutting letter in reply; and a great sea evermore 
rolled between you and the friend, whose face these 
many years has been upturned to the stars. Or it 
is a letter from a child at school, largely printed and 
ill-spelled, asking you for a little favor. You re- 
fused it, as a duty, of course, as if there were any 
duty to one another in this world but love. Or, it 
is from a poor friend, who has gone down in the 
struggle, and is in sore distress, and begs "for auld 
lang syne" to help him. You could have spared 
that twenty or fifty dollars easily ; but you were pru- 
dent. You argued : He is extravagant ; 'tis his own 
fault. It will be a lesson to refuse him. Alas ! you 
wouldn't have liked to see his face as he read your 
letter. He has long since sunk beneath the current ; 
and his children are begging their bread. Well, fold 
it up, but don't burn it. It is a voice from the grave. 



Ten Cedar Chips 



2Cant anJ» Mitl\tt 

I do not think there is any circumstances in the 
even life of Immanuel Kant, that is more painful to 
his admirers than his cold refusal of a few ducats to 
poor Fichte, to help the latter back to his native prov- 
ince. And I think there is hardly on record a more 
touching and dignified letter than this appeal of 
Fichte's, wrung from him only by the direst dis- 
tress. "By a residence in my native province, I could 
most easily obtain, as a village pastor, the perfect 
literary quiet which I desire until my faculties are 
matured. My best course thus seems to be to return 
home ; — but I am deprived of the means ; I have 
only two ducats, and even these are not my own, for 
I have yet to pay for my lodgings. There appears 
then to be no rescue for me from this situation, un- 
less I can find someone who, in reliance on my honor, 
will advance me the necessary sum for the expenses 
of mv journey, until the time when I can calculate 
with certainty on being able to make repayment. I 
know no one to whom I could offer this security 
without fear of being laughed at to my face, except 
you. * * * I am so convinced of a certain sac- 
rifice of honor in thus placing it in pledge, that the 
very necessity of giving you this assurance seems to 
deprive me of a part of it myself ; and the deep 
shame which thus falls upon me is the reason why I 
cannot make an application of this kind verbally, for 
I must have no witness of that shame. My honor 
seems to me really doubtful until that engagement 
is fulfilled, because it is always possible for the other 
party to suppose that I may never fulfil it." 

He never added, poor fellow, that in the back- 
ground, behind the imagined vicarage, was the form 
of his betrothed, Johanna Rahn, who was only wait- 
ing for these reluctant ducats to become the faithful 
wife that she proved herself to be in all the after- 
years. 



Cedar Chips ^'^ 



Now it is quite certain that no one can read that 
letter without sharing the sense of shame, that must 
have suffused the face of the writer, and tingled in 
his fingers as he wrote it. And no one can read of 
Kant's refusal — gentleman, scholar, and philoso- 
pher, as he was — without feeling equal shame. And 
yet how different are the sentiments. The one is the 
shame of great pity ; the other, the shame of disap- 
pointment. We are sorry for Fichte, because he is 
reduced to so pitiable a condition even of honorable 
mendicancy; we are sorry for Kant, because of his 
"lost opportunities." But we would retain for ever 
the letter of the fomier, as a relic of honorable 
shame ; we would gladly forget the refusal of the 
latter, as a stain on a great reputation. 



Twelve Cedar Chips 



'£, ». S. 

Ah me ! those accounts — Dr. and Cr. and L.S.D. ! 
What desperate plungers and wastrels we all were 
in our heyday ! What a stoical contempt we had for 
money ! That picture which we fancied, and which 
the dealer assured us was a real Van Dyck; that 
vast encyclopedia; twelve guineas for that Tissot's 
Life of Christ, which we instantly gave away, be- 
cauce of its horrid French realism ; that summer 
vacation — how that hotel bill did mount up! We 
shake our heads mournfully over ourselves — our- 
selves, mind, of the past, not ourselves of the pres- 
ent — there we are always devout idolaters ! But 
those items — Charity 2s. 6d. ; charity 5s. ; charity 
15s. ; charity 20s. ; are these, too, regrettable? Hap- 
pily, no! We cast our bread upon the running 
waters ; and, after many days, it was returned. 



Cedar Chips T^^t^^" 



And these diaries ! Dear me ! How brief your 
life's history ! Into how small a space have you con- 
centrated the thoughts, ideas, desires, emotions, pas- 
sions, that swayed you for so many years ! That 
day, so full of hope, or shame, or sorrow, or ambi- 
tion, or anxiety — how swiftly you have dismissed it 
in one line ! You remember you thought it would 
never end. You thought that suspense intolerable, 
that affront unbearable, that injury irreparable. 
You took a despondent view of life^ a despairful 
view of men. You said in your anger: Omnis homo 
mendax! How little it all looks now. What a speck 
in the vistas of years ! How childish now seem 
your anger, your impatience, your f retfulness ! 
How keenly you realize that the worst evils are 
those which never occur! You worked yourself into 
a fever of passion over possibilities. You saw ahead 
but rapids, and shallows and rocks. Lo ! your life 
has glided smoothly over all ; and you smile at the 
perils that encompassed you. And that bitter dis- 
appointment — that misunderstanding which threat- 
ened such dire ruin to your prospects, lo ! it has gone 
by harmlessly ; and you are ashamed of your vin- 
dictiveness and hate and childish apprehensions. The 
great wave that came on threatening to engulf you, 
you have buoyantly surmounted ; and you are out on 
the great high seas, whilst it has passed onward, and 
broken harmlessly on the shore. 

We look before and after, and pine for what is 
not. Foolish enough ! Live in the present ; and 
pull down a thick veil over the future, leaving it in 
God's hands. Live, live, in the present, sucking out 
of the hours of life all the honey they will yield. 

Mors aurem vellens, "Vivite," ait, "Venio." 



f°"'*^^° Cedar Chips 

But there is a somewhat different lesson to be 
gathered from these same old, frayed, and yellow 
records of the past. I have purposely omitted the 
first line of the quotation^ which runs thus : 

Pone merum talosque ; pereant qui crastina curaiit ; 
Mors aurera vellens, "Vivite," ait, "Venio." 

I rather like that picture of grim Death, flicking 
the ear of his victim, and whispering: "Make the 
most of it, old fellow, I'm coming for you soon." 
But the "pone merum talosque" sounds very like 
old Omar; and after all, this voluptuous life won't 
do. All men are agreed upon that, except that most 
miserable class of men of whom perhaps Des Es- 
seintes in Huysman's novel is a type ; and who closes 
his worthless, pleasure-seeking life by a fate that 
seems sufficient retribution : Siir le cheniin, dcgrise, 
seul, abominablement lassc. Neither will it do to 
seek that milder Epicurean paradise in which with- 
out labor, or suffering, and merely by mental train- 
ing and mind-abstraction, there is perfect and pro- 
found peace. I do not say that men should not prac- 
tice mind discipline so perfectly that they can shake 
oft' easily the minor worries of life. This is very 
desirable. Nay, it should be a part of all education, 
to teach that the will is paramount, that the minor 
faculties must obey it, and that a memory that loves 
to go back upon remorse, or an imagination that is 
prone to dwell on a perilous future, must be curbed 
by the superior power, and learn to abide in the 
present. But this is a long distance away from the 
religious peace connoted by the famous lines of St. 
Teresa : 

Nada te turbe ! Let nothing trouble thee ! 

Nada te espante ! Let nothing frighten thee ! 

Todo se passa. All things pass away. 

Dies no se muda ! God alone is immutable ! 

La pacienza Patience obtaius everything. 
Todo lo alcanza. 

Nada te falta : He who possesses God wants nothing : 

Solo Dios basta! God alone suffices. 



Cedar Chips Fi^'^° 



Philosophy has aimed at the former. Religion 
has secured the latter. That perfect peace — the Nir- 
vana of the Asiatics — has never been attained by 
mortal ; cannot indeed be obtained until after the 
soul has migrated from being to being, and has be- 
come so attenuated that it has lost self -conscious- 
ness. To attempt this in ordinary life is to fail. 
It seems easy to say : Abstract your mind from all 
earthly things ; let men be as shadows beneath you ; 
live in the higher atmosphere of thought, and dwell 
alone with your own soul ; let neither love, nor van- 
ity, nor ambition, nor any earthly desire have place 
in your heart ; and you will know what is meant by 
perfect peace. Alas ! we have struck our roots too 
deeply into the earth to root them thus up remorse- 
lessly without pain : and the more we seek such 
peace the farther will it fly from us. What then? 
Is there something better ? Something higher ? No ! 
there is nothing higher than perfect peace ; but it 
must be peace through holiness. In other words, 
there is no use in abstracting ourselves from earth, 
if we cling to self. After all, it is self that tor- 
ments us ; and if we could wean ourselves from 
all things else, so long as self remains, there is no 
perfect peace. 



S«'een Cedar Chips 



I was rather struck with this thought on read- 
ing Mutton's monograph on Cardinal Newman. It 
is not very interesting reading, because it is too 
philosophical, in the sense that it is too synthetic. 
We all like analysis of character — the drawing 
asunder and unravelling of the various threads that 
make up human life. But when an author begins 
to draw big conclusions on things in general from 
these threads, it is apt to weary. But, it is whole- 
some to learn that the great Cardinal did, in early 
life, grasp the principle that "Holiness is better 
than peace!" It seems a paradox, under one as- 
pect, because we generally understand that peace is 
the concomitant, or result, of holiness. But the 
meaning clearly is that the soul that seeks peace 
without holiness will never find it ; that life, an im- 
perfect thing, is inseparable from trial ; that diffi- 
culties are to be overcome, not to be avoided ; that 
the soul that shrinks into itself behind the ramparts 
of philosophic thought^ will be discovered, and that 
cares will creep over the wall ; and that, finally, it 
is only by self-abandonment, and the annihilation of 
our own wills that we can foreshadow in life the 
peace of eternity. This is what the Lord meant 
when he said : ''My peace I leave unto you ; my 
peace I give unto you ! Not as the world gives, do 
I give unto you !'* 



Cedar Chips Seventeen 



Nevertheless, whilst all this is true, there are 
secondary helps in reflection which are not to be de- 
spised. And one of these comes from retrospection. 
Remorse foi' failures or mistakes is foolish. They 
are part and parcel of our imperfection. The past 
should not be allowed to cast a shadow of gloom on 
the present, nor to project itself across our future. 
But it has its lessons — the supreme one, that anx- 
iety is not only want of faith, but foolish in the ex- 
treme ; and the other, a lesson of supreme gratitude 
to the merciful Providence who has ordered our 
lives so peacefully. The little souls that fume and 
fret under the little worries and vexations of life, 
should often take up their diaries and read them. 
There they will see how trifling were the things that 
poisoned their daily happiness ; how insignificant the 
grains of dust that made the discord of their lives. 
A little courage would have brushed that dust aside 
and restored the soul to harmony and happiness. 
But no! we preferred the luxury of knowing that 
we were unhappy ; and grudged ourselves the little 
labor that would have restored concord and peace. 
Nay, most people nurse their miseries, and help them 
to grow, as if they believed that the monotony of 
peace were undesirable ; and that a life varied by 
vexations were preferable to a calm and equable ex- 
istence free from worry, and mapped without the red 
or black lines that connote disaster or suffering. 



^'8^'"'^° Cedar Chips 



Then, I would make such little souls walk the 
hospitals at least once a year. Nothing reconciles 
the unhappy to their lot, but to see others suffer 
more, and to see what they themselves have escaped. 
The philosopher who suffers from taedium vitae, 
the fine lady who is ennuyee, the querulous, the dis- 
contented, should see the possibilities of suffering 
that are, alas ! the inheritance of our race. Here, 
within earshot of the busy hum of city life, is a staid 
building. No pretense to architecture without; 
within,, everything sacrificed to cleanliness and neat- 
ness. A few yards away, on the pavements of the 
great city, the votaries of Vanity are sweeping by, 
their little frames filled out and decorated with all 
the appliances that Art and Fashion can invent. 
They walk with the proud gait, the stately move- 
ments of young gods and goddesses. The earth is 
theirs ; and theirs is the heritage of the sky and sea. 
Here, ranged in long rows, are the couches of their 
suffering sisters. V^ery low and humble they are, as 
their breasts heave with the convulsions of difficult 
breathing, for that tiny occult mechanism has built 
him a resting-place in their lungs, and is living by 
exhausting their life. Round, lustrous eyes, hectic 
cheeks, dry, hot hands, wet hair, are their signs and 
symbols of disease ; and creosote, formaldehyde, car- 
bolic, have taken the place of the White Rose, or 
Heliotrope, which they shook from their raiment 
only a little while hence, as they spurned the very 
pavement beneath their feet. 



Cedar Chips Nineteen 



Here again is another Temple of Hygeia, or 
rather of Death, for in these cancerous and tuber- 
cular cases the fair goddess is ruthlessly expelled 
by the skeleton god. Tossing on couches of pain, 
their entrails gnawed by the fell disease, or visibly 
rotting away from the disease in cheek, or tongue, or 
teeth, or breast, the poor victims linger on through 
a hell of agony, and invoke the King of Terrors in 
vain. And here is another Temple where some two 
thousand are lodged, — being once rational, but now 
with reason dethroned, — helpless, animals, ships 
without a rudder, tossed hither and thither through 
the stormy seas of their imaginings, with no power 
of guiding and directing themselves through the 
fierce impulses of animal instincts and desires. It 
is a cage for wild beasts. Witness the iron-barred 
windows, the padded cell, the various instruments 
of restraint, the strong men and women to cope 
with the paroxysms of insanity. And this is a Tem- 
ple of Justice, wherein the elements dangerous to 
society are incarcerated. A thousand cells radiate 
from a central hall. In each is an outcast. Seated 
on a plank bed, staring at white-washed walls, fed 
like a beast through an aperture, each wretched soul 
ponders on his misery, eats his heart with remorse, 
or curses that society which, for its own safety and 
well-being, thinks it necessary to separate him from 
the rest of his fellow-mortals thus. 



T^^'enty Cedar Chips 



Minor lEuilH 

And so, side by side, the gay and the sorrowful, 
Fortune's darlings and Destiny's victims, move, in 
a kind of Holbein picture, toward the inevitable. 
Now, who hath cast the dice, and appointed the lots 
of each ? It is not merit, for in most cases my Lady 
of pain on her couch of suffering is a very much 
superior being to my Lady of pleasure on the pave- 
ment. But that is not the question now. The (jues- 
tion now is, how can you repine at trifles, and fret 
yourself to death over imaginary troubles, like 
Moliere's Le Malade, when you have escaped the 
coffin, the hospital, the gaol, the Bedlam, and all their 
terrible concomitants? And if you have come to 
middle age, or have mounted the mid-hill and crest 
of life, and are passing peacefully into the valley, 
how can you repine, when you have left so much 
misery behind you, and the fair vista of an honored 
old age stretches before you. Oh, but that disap- 
pointment ! That success of my neighbor's ! That 
prosperous marriage! That successful speculation! 
He taken and I left! He with ten thousand a year, 
and I with only five ! And he, with ten letters after 
his honored name, and I with only six ! Avaunt, 
thou ingrate ! That who hast never proven — 

How salt a savor hath 
The bread of others, and how hard a path 
To climb and to descend the stranger's stairs. 



Cedar Chips Twenly-one 



A« Examination af IGifp 

I would put side by side, in parallel columns with 
the Table of Sins in every Catholic prayer-book, an 
examination of escaped horrors thus : — 

Hast thou ever been under the surgeon's knife? 
Hast thou ever seen the doctors in their white 
waterproofs, or bloodproofs, gaily chatting in the 
operating room, and testing the edges of their 
knives, and thou on the table? Hast thou seen the 
sponges and the lint, and the splinters, and the hot- 
water, and the nurses standing by the table watch- 
ing thee ? Hast thou ever known the sickening odor 
of the anaesthetic, which is to send thee into the 
unknown bourn, from which thou mayst never re- 
turn? Hast thou ever had sentence of death passed 
on thee by thy physician ? That cough is phthisis ; 
that little nodule of flesh is incipient cancer; that 
flush and chill is typhus ; that sudden pain in thy 
left arm is cardiac trouble ; that inability to grasp 
thy pen is incipient parafysis ; that strange hesitation 
about thy words is brain disease. Hast thou ever 
dreaded the slow approach of insanity? Hast thou, 
like a certain great Cardinal, lived all thy life be- 
neath its horrible shadow? Hast thou fallen into 
the grip of the law, and carried with thee the indeli- 
ble stain of the prison? Nay, do not frown down 
the question as impertinent. Did not Philip Neri 
say to Philip, as he saw a criminal haled to execu- 
tion : There thou goest, Philip, but for the grace of 
God! And if thou hast escaped all these things, and 
the many more too numerous to mention, go down 
on thy knees and thank thy God for His mercies ! 



Twenty-two Cedar Chips 



Thank God for the greatest mercy of all — that 
He has drawn down an impenetrable veil over thy 
future ; and lifts the curtains of thy destiny, only 
fold by fold, and day by day. What would it be if 
the same Hand had unrolled for thee the map of 
thy life, and shown thee in thy adolescence all the 
terrors of thy future years? How thou wouldst 
have glided over the pleasure of thy existence with 
indifference, and fastened the eyes of thy imagina- 
tion on the dangers and the pitfalls, the sorrows and 
the shames, that are marked so clearly on the dia- 
gram of thy existence! How thou wouldst extenu- 
ate and make little of life's pleasures ; and exagger- 
ate its pains! And with what terrible foreboding 
wouldst thou approach crisis after crisis in thy life; 
and forget the chance of victory in the dread of de- 
feat! Verily, God is merciful! It is only to His 
great martyrs, most of all to the Queen of Martyrs, 
that He reveals the far-off Mount of Suffering : and 
allows the shadow of the three crosses cast by the 
setting sun of Olivet to darken the pathway of an 
entire life! 



Cedar Chips Twenty-three 



®I|r ©rbmng of SrBling 

I wondei, is there a human being who would 
wilHngly take the ordering of his destiny out of the 
hands of Divine Providence, and cast the horoscope 
of his own life? Would he accept the proposal if 
made to him thus : 

"Now you can frame and form your future ac- 
cording to your own desires. You can have all that 
the human heart may desire — wealth, position, 
honors, influence, old age. But you must accept 
with them their concomitants ; and the burden of 
your own imperfections. You can frame your 
future destiny ; but you must bear it on your own 
shoulders ; and look for no assistance from above." 

No Christian believer would accept such a pro- 
posal ; and it is doubtful even if a pure Agnostic 
would not shrink from the responsibility. We might 
elect to have the framing of our own futures, bit by 
bit ; but to round our whole lives in the circle of our 
fantasies and wishes is a something we would shrink 
from. And then there is always the possibility of 
disappointment and defeat with the self-reproach 
that would accompany both, if we made our own 
election. Now, if we fail, the failing is not of our 
own choosing. We can place it at the door of Des- 
tiny ; or^ with higher faith and meekness we can 
say it is the Will of God. But the sense of respon- 
sibility and remorse is absent, which would not be 
the case if disaster and defeat followed close in the 
wake of the voyage we had mapped for ourselves 
along the high seas of life. There! What a medi- 
tation I have made over an open trunk ! ! 



Tweniy-four Cedar Chips 



1 have two constant, never varying loves — my 
philosophers and my poets. I cannot conceive a 
greater mental pleasure or stimulant than the study 
of mental philosophy. It is, after all, the great 
study. It is so clear, so defined, so perfect in defini- 
tion and principle and axiom, that you feel quite 
safe and walking on level ground, until suddenly the 
great gulf yawns under your feet, and beneath you 
is roaring the unplummeted sea. You look down, 
down. It is crystal-clear, but no soundings. Here 
Plato gazed, and Aristotle pondered ! Here Kant 
watched during his ninety years, only to turn away 
sadly in the end. Here, too^ our child-philosophers 
of this unthinking age, fling their little lines weighted 
with modern discoveries. Alas ! they will not even 
sink beneath the surface. And the great deeps are 
still unfathomed, and the great gulf unspanned. 
And yet the quest is not unfruitful. If it only 
taught humility, it would be a great gain. But it 
does more. It is like the vision of the Holy Grail 
that: 

Drove them from all vainglories, rivalries, 
And earthly heats that spring and sparkle out 
Among us in the jousts, while women watch 
Who wins, who falls ; and waste the spiritual strength 
Within us, better offered up to Heaven. 

At least, we know of no dishonored Knight of Phi- 
losophy. Votaries of other sciences may be im- 
pure. And alas ! for our poets — the sacred fire does 
not always burn up carnal concupiscence. But 
Philosophy seems always to have kept her clients 
clean from grosser appetites and fleshly desires ; and 
if they erred, it was through the spirit, and not 
through the flesh. 



Cedar Chips Twenty-five 



QIl|p Utrttm of Snug 

It would seem that Lord Macaulay, the most 
successful man of letters of his generation, did ex- 
perience that fine tonic of strong minds — the envy 
and jealousy of his contemporaries. It is strange 
that this curious and venomous antagonism does not 
seem to enter the sacred precincts of Art, nor yet the 
domain of Science. The reason is evident. Only 
experts who had passed through a professional train- 
ing will venture to criticise a picture, or ofifer an 
opinion on a new discovery in Science. But in lit- 
erature, everyone is qualified to judge; and to re- 
ject or accept, condemn or magnify a new appear- 
ance. Philosophy, however, has her atonements and 
consolations. All will pass ! It is the book-mark of 
St. Teresa over again — honor, dishonor; the smile, 
the sneer ; the glory, the gibe ; the laurel, the thorn ; 
all will pass : 

Yes, they will pass away ; nor deem it strange ; 

They come and go, as comes and goes the sea ; 
And let them come and go ; tliou, through all change 

Fix thy firm gaze on Virtue and on me! 



Twenty-six Cedar Chips 



^t Auguattn^ anh Maine ht Wimn 

I dare say this idea of the limitation of human 
action and feeling, and the eternal craving after the 
infinite and illimitable in the human mind can be 
seen exemplified in most human lives. Especially is 
it observable in men of thought or fine sensibilities. 
But I have seen it confessed clearly only in two 
lives, that of St. Augustine^ as revealed in his Con- 
fessions; and that of Maine de Biran, as revealed in 
his Thoughts. This latter was one of those unhappy 
mortals, who to their own sorrow, but the everlasting 
benefit of mankind, have been tortured by nerves. 
He was so finely constructed that his emotions 
swayed to the slightest touch, swinging low down 
in the deepest depression at a word or look or a 
reverse or a dyspepsia ; and again thrown high into 
the empyrean of exalted reflection by equally minute 
and trifling causes. These Pensces would be pitiful 
reading were they not relieved here and there by 
gleams of inspiration — great lightning-flashes of 
thought athwart the low thunder clouds of despon- 
dency. His life was an alternation of desires for 
solitude when in society, and impatience of self 
when in solitude. "La commerce des hommes," he 
writes, "m'a gate et me gate tons les jours"; but he 
was forever craving for their companionship 
amongst the woods and waters of Grateloup. "I 
walk like a somnambulist in the world of affairs." 
But when it came to the point to choose, he refused 
to say the word, and turned back to politics. He is 
a stranger amidst the pomps and ceremonies of the 
French Court; he hates himself for his presence 
there, and his nervous unsuitableness ; but he cannot 
remain away. He clamors for the infinity of thought 
in solitude ; but craves for the limitations of action 
in society. 



Cedar Chips Twenty-seven 



V>ry early in life, and long before he became a 
Christian in thoug^ht and feeling^ he recognized the 
dual nature in man ; and writes strongly against Vol- 
taire and Condillac, and all the tribe of writers of 
the sensist or materialist school. He will not admit 
the sovereignty of sense; he demands the suprem- 
acy of the soul. Granted. But does he find peace; 
the peace for which he is forever clamoring? He 
admits it is the sununum bonum, nay, the only good 
here below. He confesses his contempt for the 
things which the world prizes. He has seen them, 
and tested their hollowness. He flies from them 
and buries himself in the desert of his own soul. 
The philosophy of the Porch is now his religion. He 
will be self-sufficing. He will subdue all riotous 
feeling of passion and even sensation ; and, under the 
arbitrary rule of the soul, he will find peace. He 
will desire nothing, and therefore want nothing. 
All shall be harmony of nicely adjusted thoughts 
and sentiments, of passions subdued and reined by 
a strong hand ; Nature shall yield its manifold treas- 
ures of peaceful bliss ; and an imagination, rightly 
controlled, will serve to lift the soul beyond time and 
death, and project another existence on the canvas 
of eternity. But the oaks and streams heard still 
but the agony of a disappointed and despairing soul. 
Yes ! all was satisfied, but the insatiable — La Soif de 
Dieu ! 



Twenty-eight Cedar Chips 



He liked, as all such souls like, every line that 
speaks of the beauty and happiness of a solitary life. 
And all literature, Divine and human, is replete with 
those threnodies of the heart — the desire to be away, 
and at rest. "Would that I had the wings of a 
dove" ; "O for a lodge in some vast wilderness !" 
Was the author of the "Imitation," merely parody- 
mg the words of St. Augustine in all the many curi- 
ous ways he had of uttering the same thought : "Noli 
foras ahire; in teipsiim redi; in interior c homine hab- 
itat Veritas!" And I suppose most people (always 
excepting the artists themselves) must have felt a 
little attendrissement du coeur at the closing lines 
of that favorite duet in Trovatore: "There shall be 
rest! there shall be rest!" Certain it is that Maine 
de Biran was forever craving rest, rest, rest — from 
the fever of fashion, from the turmoil of politics, 
from the stings of wasps, the hollowness and insin- 
cerity of the world ; and he was for ever dreaming, 
dreaming in the Court of Versailles or at the Tuiler- 
ies of his woods and walks, of the rustling leaves, 
the singing of birds, the purling of streams, the 
peace of the mountains, the solitude of the valleys. 
Then came the reality. Lo! here is all this sylvan 
beauty ; and here is solitude deep enough for a 
Bruno I And here is peace, and deep profound 
thought, and the absorption of the soul in the reveries 
of metaphysics. Alas, no! or not altogether. A 
cloudy sky, an indiscretion at table, a look, a word ; 
and lo ! the paradise is broken up. So dependent is 
the soul on the caprices of the body ! There are 
two principles in man — et primum quod est animate! 



Cedar Chips Twenty-nine 



®ljr lEquilthrium of Slftnga 

"Bene qui latuit, bene vixit !" It was a favorite 
maxim of Descartes who had also another favorite 
doctrine, which I recommend earnestly, namely, the 
sanitary value to mind and body, of long fits of idle- 
ness. Maine de Biran would not, and did not, accept 
the latter. He could not. He was made otherwise, 
a thing compacted out of nerves, and fed by a planet 
and a star — by Mercury and Phosphor. He knew 
well the glorious blessing of such a constitution, and 
— its curse ! He admits that the dull, practical, geo- 
metrical reasoner has less joy out of youth, but more 
security in age. And that if the nervous dreamer 
and thinker has visions of the gods in his heyday, 
he must suffer by diabolic apparitions in the even- 
ing of his days. It is the eternal equilibrium of 
things — the just apportionment of fate to mortals. 
The most careful chemist does not sift and mix on 
his glass measure the drugs that make for life or 
death so carefully as the Fates dole out their desti- 
nies to mortals. Or, rather, not destinies, but the 
factors of destinies — the powers of action or suffer- 
ing, of reason and imagination, of mental or phys- 
ical constituents, that go to construct the sum total 
of those transient dreams or experiences which we 
call Life. 



Thirty Cedar Chips 



3ln ^l|tUia0pI|p ilanqw 

But the maxim of Descartes: "Bene qui latuit, 
bene vixit," he loved it, but did not accept it. Or 
rather, accepted it only in theory. It is the motto of 
those who are surfeited by fame, or notoriety; not 
of those who have never tasted either. Men can 
despise riches when they possess them ; fame, when 
the fickle goddess woos them. But all men would 
like to drink from the cup of Tantalus, and grasp 
the skirts of the phantom. Fame. Yet, Maine de 
Biran, let it be said, had even a nobler ambition. 
He deplores the necessity of his taking part in po- 
litical and social matters to the exclusion of intel- 
lectual pursuits, for which he believed he possessed 
a certain aptitude. And life was passing by ; and 
nothing done. All this externation which he de- 
tested, but which arrested every movement towards 
the life of solitude and retreat which he coveted, in- 
duced at least a condition of intellectual atrophy 
from want of exercise; and he saw himself far ad- 
vanced into middle age, without the prospect or hope 
of realizing his one ambition — "avoir laisse quelque 
monument honorable de son passage sur la terre." 
A victim of circumstances, a prey to ill-health, with 
all the power and the desire of becoming the fore- 
most thinker of his age, he remained to the end — 
un philosophe manque. 



Cedar Chips Thirty-one 



(grrat WtiUra mh tifs (Eljurrtf 

It is strange how great minds invariably turn, by 
some instinct or attraction, towards this eternal mir- 
acle — the Church. Carlyle admits in his extreme old 
age that the Mass is the most genuine relic of re- 
ligious belief left in the world. Goethe was for 
ever introducing the Church into his conversations 
coupling it with the idea of power, massive strength, 
and ubiquitous influence. Byron would insist that 
his daughter, Allegra, should be educated in a con- 
vent, and brought up a Catholic, and nothing else. 
And Ruskin, although he did say some bitter things 
about us, tells us what a strong leaninghe hastowards 
monks and monasteries ; how he pensively shivered 
with Augustinians at St. Bernard ; happily made hay 
with Franciscans at Fiesole ; sat silent with the Car- 
thusians in their little gardens south of Florence ; 
and mourned through many a day-dream at Bolton 
and Melrose. Then he closes his little litany of 
sympathy with the quaintly Protestant conclusion : 
But the wonder is always to me, not how much, but 
how little, the monks have on the whole done, with 
all that leisure, and all that goodwill. 



Th'rty-'wo Cedar Chips 



iRuQktn 

He cannot understand! That is all. But why? 
Because he cannot search the archives of Heaven. 
He knows nothing of the supernatural — of the in- 
visible work of prayer — of work that is worship. He 
has never seen the ten thousand thousand words of 
praise that have ascended to the Most High ; and 
the soft dews of graces innumerable that have come 
down from Heaven in answer to prayer. He has 
painted, as no one else., except perhaps Carlyle could, 
the abominations of modern life ; and he has flung 
all the strength of his righteous anger against them. 
He has never asked himself why God is so patient, 
whilst John Ruskin rages ; or why fire and brim- 
stone are not showered from Heaven, as whilom on 
the Cities of the Plain. He had read his Bible, 
year by year, hard words, Levitical laws, commin- 
atory Psalms, from iv opx^ to Amen ; and, what is 
more rare, he believed in it. Yet he never tried to 
fathom the mystery of the unequal dealings of God 
with mankind. He never saw the anger of the most 
High soothed, and his Hand stayed by the midnight 
prayer and scourge of the Trappist and the Car- 
thusian. Dante could never have written the Para- 
diso, if he had not heard Cistercians chanting at 
midnight ! 



Cedar Chips Thirty-three 



Work nvh Pragrr 

So, too, he failed to understand how a mountain- 
monk would positively refuse to go into raptures 
about crags and peaks ; and fix his thoughts on 
eternity. "I didn't come here to look at mountains," 
was the abrupt answer of the stern monk to the 
nineteenth century aesthete. What then? You must 
think of something, my shaven friend, or go mad. 
"I thought of the ancient days; I had in mind the 
eternal years," was the reply. Very profitless em- 
ployment, certainly, to the eyes of modern wisdom, 
which believes that "work is worship" ; but that 
worship is not work. How can it be, when you see 
no visible results — no pilng up of shekels, nor hoist- 
ing of sky-scrapers, no hoggish slaughter-houses, 
nor swinish troughs ; only psalms that die out in the 
midnight darkness, and silent prayer from lonely cell 
away on that snow-clad mountain summit? 



^rty-^o""^ Cedar Chips 



I notice that this is the one feature in Catholicity 
which the Protestant mind can never understand. It 
appreciates cordially the Catholic work of rescue — 
the rescue of the waif from the street, of the Mag- 
dalen from the gaol or river, of the dnmkard from 
the bottle, of the gambler from the table, of the 
orphan from destitution and vice. And so it will 
tolerate, but only tolerate, educational or charitable 
institutions or communities — what we call Active 
Orders. But the Contemplative Orders it cannot 
understand. Why a number of monks and nuns 
should be shut up in cloistered seclusion, cut away 
from all sympathy with human life and endeavor, 
apparently unproductive and useless factors in the 
great giant march of progress, is unintelligible. Of 
course, it is ! Because God is unintelligible, or rather 
ignored. Because all modern religion, outside the 
Church, develops itself into humanitarianism — that 
is, positivism — that is, atheism in its crudest and most 
naked aspect. 



Cedar Chips Thirty-five 



(^ah, or Mnn 

In fact, all controversy between the Church and 
the world is rapidly resolving itself into this: Is 
God to be placed in the foreground of His universe; 
or is man ? The Church strenuously affirms the 
former ; the world, the latter. The Church says, 
God is everything; man, nothing, except in God. 
God, the centre to which all things tend, and from 
which all things radiate ; man, not the apex of crea- 
tion by any means, only a unit in creation, made 
sublime by his aspirations, his hopes, his sufferings, 
and his destiny. A generation that has lost all faith 
in Thirty-nine Articles or other formulary, seeks 
vainly for something that will take the place of 
vanished beliefs. The next thing to hand is human- 
ity — man, the little god of this planet. Agnoscimus! 
we know no more ! And the Eternal Church keeps 
tolling its bell through the world ; and the burden of 
its persistent calling is the monotone of Time, echoed 
from Eternity : God, and God, and God ! 



Thirty-six Cedar Chips 



(Bifs 2IIf0rtt0 of SItti?raturp 

All successful writers are unanimous in warning 
off young aspirants from the thorny path of litera- 
ture. Grant Allen would give them a broom, and 
bid them take to crossing-sweeping ; Gibbon, de 
Quincey, Scott, Southey, Lamb, Thackeray, — all 
showed the weals and lashes of the hard taskmaster; 
amongst moderns, Daudet warns that brain-work is 
the most exacting of all species of labor, and must 
eventuate, sooner or later, in a bad break-down ; Mr. 
Zangwill says, somewhat grandiosely : "Whoso with 
blood and tears would dig art out of his soul, may 
lavish his golden prime in pursuit of emptiness ; or 
striking treasure, find only fairy gold, so that when 
his eye is purged of the spell of morning, he sees 
his hand full of withered leaves." And dear old 
Sam Johnson, who certainly passed through his 
Inferno and Purgatorio before he settled down in 
the comfortable paradise at Streatham, epitomizes 
his hardships as author in the well-known line: 

Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol. 



Cedar Chips Thiny-sevcD 



Ambition 

Nor can all these aspirants claim the steady nerve 
and calm philosophy of Jean Paul, who can see in 
poverty but "the pain of piercing a maiden's ears, 
that you may hang precious jewels in the wound." 
It is a bitter thing, a severe initiation into mysteries 
otherwise unintelligible; and hence it is, I suppose, 
that with the eternal hope of youth, the ambitious 
see but the goal and the prize ; and like Alpine climb- 
ers, undismayed by the fate of others, and utterly 
oblivious of danger, they refuse to see crevasse 
or avalanche, or sliding glacier. They only see the 
peaks far away, shining like amber in the morning 
sun ; and they promise themselves that, at evening, 
they shall stand on that summit where no foot of 
mortal had ever trodden before. It is somewhat 
melancholy ; and yet it is the one thing that gives 
to the biographical part of literature that interest, 
amounting to sympathy, that is the right of the 
strong, who have fought their way through difficul- 
ties to success. 



Thirty-eight Cedar Chips 



It would be well, however, that this sympathy 
took a practical turn, especially where genius is 
concerned ; and I know no more touching instance 
of this inspiring hopefulness than the letters of his 
sister Laura to Balzac. She stood by him and en- 
couraged him, when his parents turned him from the 
door as a fool, because he gave up the comfortable 
profession of notary, and took to the dry crusts and 
rags of literature ; she sympathized with all his 
struggles, rejoiced in all his triumphs ; she advised 
him, controlled him, encouraged him ; and she stood 
by his bedside on that fatal day, August 18, 1850, 
when, after thirty hours of fearful agony, he died 
in the city that refused to recognize his talents till 
after death. A lurid, tempestuous, passionate life — 
misdirected and misapplied ! His biographer told the 
truth when he said that Paris was a hell, but a hell, 
the only place worth living in ; and of this he vowed 
to be a Dante. He succeeded but too well ; and it 
would have been better for him and the world if he 
had left the secrets unrevealed. But, at least, Laura 
was his Beatrice. 



Cedar Chips Thirty-nine 

Poor Henry Murger, too ! All that one can re- 
member of him is his mother's intense devotion; 
his horrible disease, purpura, which he laughingly 
declared he wore with a dignity of a Roman Em- 
peror ; his chivalric devotion to the Sister of Charity 
who nursed him in hospital — "A good Sister you 
were, the Beatrice of that hell. Your soothing 
consolations were so sweet, that we all complained 
whenever we had the chance, so as only to be con- 
soled by you ;" — his anticipation of O. W. Holmes' 
poem, "The Voiceless" : 

Nous avons cru pouvoir — -nous I'avons cru souvent 
Formuler notre reve, et le rendre vivant 

Par la palette ou par la lyre; 
Mais le souffle manquait, et personne n'a pu 
Deviner quel etait le poeme inconnu 

Que nous ne savions pas traduire. 

Then, his childish warning ofif the priests: "Tell 
them I have read Voltaire." Finally his cry : "Take 
me to the Church : God can do more than any phy- 
sician." His final happy death, after receiving the 
last Sacraments. Poor fellows! with their sad 
motto : The Academy, the Asylum, or the Morgue ! 
How the heart of a Vincent de Paul, or a Philip 
Neri, would have yearned over your helplessness 
and your genius, and wept for your follies and your 
sins ! And how lesser folk would have liked to burst 
into your attic, and tear your valuable papers from 
the fire, and send ruddy blazes out of more ready 
material dancing up the chimney ; and pelted you 
with sandwiches till you cried. Hold ! and then sat 
down with you on a soap-box or on your dingy bed ; 
and filled out in long ruby glasses the Margaux or 
Lafitte you had not tasted for many a day; and 
finally settled down to a calm, long, soporific smoke, 
and listened to the song, the anecdote, the bon mot, 
that would turn the gloom of Phlegethon into an 
Attic night, and the lentils of a Daniel into a supper 
of the sfods! 



f"**"^ Cedar Chips 



Pascal, too, found a rare helper and sympathizer 
in his sister — the Madame Perrier, who wrote his 
life so briefly, but significantly. Not, indeed that 
he needed any spiritual strength or support from 
any external power; for he was a self-contained 
spirit, and thought little of human help. And his 
genius was colossal. Like Aristotle he seems to have 
thought out a whole scheme of creation, unaided. 
It is rather a singular instance of human folly that 
he should have been considered a sceptic. There 
is no stopping the tongues of men. The same charge 
was levelled against Dr. Newman. Mozeley attrib- 
utes the great popularity of the Oratorian in Eng- 
land to that. Perhaps there were never two men 
who believed more intensely and undeservedly. But 
the Frenchman lacked serenity. He lost his nobility 
by engaging, not so much in a lost cause, as a bad 
cause. He descended to cynicism and sarcasm — the 
expression of a form of lower mental condition. 
And this, too, affected his greatest, if most imper- 
fect work. When the Provincial Letters are for- 
gotten or neglected as splenetic sarcasm, and have 
passed away like the Junius and Drapier Letters, 
and have become but the study of the connoisseur, 
his "Pensees" will remain, broken fragments of an 
incomplete, but immortal work. 



Cedar Chips Fony-one 



What judgment will posterity pass on them? It 
would be difficult to say. But if we may gauge the 
future by the present, we would say that the verdict 
of a more enlightened age than ours will be, that 
Pascal was no sceptic, though a bold inquirer; that 
his marvellous mental keenness and vigor were only 
equalled by his rigid asceticism ; that Nature had 
made him pious, and circumstances made him proud ; 
that these "Thoughts" which reveal to us his inner 
life are beautiful and deep beyond words; that they 
would have even the color of that inspiration which 
comes from Nature and Grace united, were it not 
for a dark shadow which stretches itself over all, 
making the philosophy of them less clear, the truth 
of them less apparent, the study of them a task of 
anxiety and suspicion, instead of being one of edifi- 
cation and delight. 



f°'*y-'^° Cedar Chips 



In fact, I know but of one case where a sister's 
influence was hurtful; and that was the case of 
Ernest Renan. It is impossible to explain how a 
woman, and a Bretonne, could have lent the aid of 
her sisterly influence to wean him away from the 
sanctuary, and then from the Church itself. There 
is something inexpressibly revolting about it, be- 
cause I think, of all human loves, that of a sister 
is the most abiding and unselfish. In a mother's 
love there is a kind of identification with her child, 
his triumphs, his defeats, which, by the reflection 
on herself, takes away the absolute disinterestedness. 
Conjugal love is more intense, but for that reason 
more intermittent. But there's not a trace of self 
in that earnest, wistful gaze which a beloved sister 
casts after the poor young fellow who has just gone 
out from the sanctity of home-life into the world's 
arena; nor a thought of self in the way the silent 
heart broods over shattered hopes, and takes back to 
its sanctuary the broken relics of the idol, once 
worshipped, now, alas ! only protected from the gaze 
of a scornful world. 



Cedar Chips Forty-three 



A Bitrtnlir Qlrnaor 

Could any punishment be too great for that great 
critic in the great Quarterly, who boasted to Harriet 
Martineau, with a sardonic grin, that he was trying 
to squeeze out a little more (here he used the ges- 
ture) oil of vitrol on the head of a poor poet whose 
verses had unhappily fallen into his hands? He 
said that he and his collaborateurs were rather 
disappointed because they could not squeeze as much 
of the burning fluid into their pens as they would 
like. And one of them had the reputation of being 
especially humane in his sympathies; and wept co- 
piously over Burns' address "To a Mouse." I 
wonder how would that grim Rhadamanthus, Dante 
Alighieri, apportion them their places in his Inferno? 
How would he equalize their punishment to their 
crime? Think of the sinking of heart, bitterness of 
the spirit, the longing for death, which that poor 
fellow felt when the cruel, stinging sarcasms met 
his eyes ; and the burning drops fell slowly upon his 
soul! How he yearned to hide himself from the 
world ! How he slunk through the streets, a shadow 
of shame, and dreaded to meet the eyes of men! 
How his friends pitied him, and were ashamed of 
him ; and how his enemies gloated over his discom- 
fiture ! Yes ! what would Dante have done with 
these criminals? I think I can imagine! 



^oTty.iour Cedar Chips 



l^mt nnii 3fxmr 

I know nothing so melancholy as that cenotaph 
of Dante in the Church of San Marco in Florence. 
It is a perpetual act of contrition and humiliation on 
the part of that famous municipality ; or it is a 
feeble attempt to clasp the shadow of him whose 
ashes repose in Ravenna. One might condone the 
former sentiment, and pity the latter. Yet, it is 
something to see a great people doing penance 
through the centuries for the crime of their fore- 
fathers. It is the old story of aggression and hate 
triumphant for the moment; and then the Nemesis 
unsated, eternally dogging their footsteps. For 
this is the one supreme consolation — that injustice, 
no matter how powerful and supreme, has ever but 
a temporary and a transient triumph ; and that soon- 
er or later the Fate comes hurrying on, veiled from 
head to foot, and stands silent by the side of the 
individual or the nation, never to be exorcised, never 
to be propitiated, until it has wrung out the last 
drop of retribution appointed by the unseen tribunal 
that judges the unit and the race. What would not 
the Florentines give to-day to erase two pages from 
their history — the flame-scorched page of the holo- 
caust of their monk, and the letter of expatriation, 
which drove their poet to exile and death! 



Cedar Chips Forty-five 



Uift Waxktt tn 3lron 

Some fifty years after the great Florentine's 
deaths there lived in an obscure street in Ravenna 
one of those artists in iron and brass, of which the 
towns in Italy then were full. You may see their 
handiwork still in cathedral gates, in the iron fret- 
work around a shrine, in the gratings around the 
Sacramental altars in episcopal churches ; and if you 
have not seen them, and entertain any lingering 
doubts, look up your Ruskin, and he will make you 
ashamed. These were the days when men worked 
slowly and devoutly, conscious that work was pray- 
er, and that they were laboring for the centuries, 
and not for mere passing bread. We cannot do it 
now, for we toil in the workshops of Mammon ; and 
neither fames, nor fame, can give the inspiration of 
that mother of art, called faith. Well, this artist's 
name was Jacopo Secconi ; and he had an only child, 
a daughter, whose name was Beatrice, called after 
the great poet who had made his last home at Ra- 
venna. The old man, for he was now old, never 
tired of speaking to his child of the great exile ; and 
Bice never tired of questioning her father about 
Beatrice, and the wonders of Purgatory and Heaven. 
Once a month, however, a dark shadow would fall 
upon their threshold ; a brother of Jacopo's, from 
Florence, who would come over to see his niece, for 
he loved her ; but she did not love him. For, after the 
midday meal, the conversation of the two brothers 
invariably turned upon Dante and Florence, and 
Dante and Ravenna. No matter how it commenced, 
it veered steadily around to the everlasting topic, 
and on that they held directly contradictory views. 



f"°rty-six Cedar Chips 



The Florentine stoutly maintained that Dante 
was in Hell, and eternally damned. 

"You say here," he would say, pointing his long 
finger, and sweeping the whole of Ravenna in a 
circle, "Bccovi I'uomo che stato all' Inferno! I say: 
Eccovi I'uomo che sta all' Inferno!" 

"Corpo di Bacco!" the brother would exclaim, 
"you deserve to go thither yourself for such a say- 
ing. God couldn't send such a man to Hell. He 
could not give such a triumph to Satan!" 

"Dante hath sent priests and bishops and cardi- 
nals there," the brother would reply. "He hath filled 
its gloomy caverns with his enemies. He was venge- 
ful and unforgiving. There is no place for such in 
Heaven!" 

"I saw him here in exile," replied Jacopo, "when 
you, good Florentines, drove him out. I saw him 
walking our streets, a grave, solitary man. My 
father used point him out, and say : 'Look well, 
Jacopone, look well ! That's a face that men will 
worship to the end of time!' " 

"A bad, gloomy face, full of sourness and malice 
to God and man," the Florentine would reply. 

"Presence of the Devil! No, no, no!" cried 
Jacopo. "But a great, solemn, marble face, chiselled 
as with a point of fire. I mind it well. He used to 
pass our door, always looking forward and upward, 
his cloak slung around him, and the folded beret on 
his head. Men used to kneel down and kiss the 
pavement where he trod. God sent his angels and 
his Beatrice for him when he died." 



Cedar Chips F^^y. 



"Pah !" would exclaim his brother. '"That's a 
pious deceit. There are only ten commandments, 
brother mine ; and one of these, the greatest : 'Thou 
shalt love!' Believe me, your Dante has read the 
Lasciate more than once since he died!" 

"Then where could God put him?" shouted 
Jacopo. "Did he create another circle for him lower 
down ? No ! no ! God does not damn such souls as 
Dante's ! I allow you he may be in Purgatory for a 
short time, because we must all go thither for our 
sins and imperfections. But Dante damned ! All 
Heaven would cry out against it !" 

So the controversy would rage, month after 
month, and Bice would listen with wondering, tear- 
ful eyes. But she hated her uncle cordially, and 
would refuse to kiss him when he went away. And 
for days Jacopo would not be the same ; but he 
swung to his work in a moody, silent, abstracted 
way, and sometimes he would pause, and wipe the 
sweat from his brow, and say to himself: 

"Dante in Hell ! Yes, he was ! We all know 
that ; but he is not. I swear it. He is not !" 

And he would bring down his hammer furiously 
upon the iron ; and Bice, cooking the midday meal, 
would tremble and cry. 



Forty-eight Cedar Chips 



PragprB for tlyp Iraii 

But in the cool evening, when her work was 
done, and father had had his supper, and was 
poring over the great black-letter pages of his great 
poet, Bice would steal down to the little church just 
around the corner, and pray long and earnestly. 
For she was a sweet, innocent child, and loved all 
things, but most of all God, as the Supreme Beauty. 
Then she prayed for the soul of her good mother, 
who was dead ; and lastly, she knelt before a favorite 
Madonna, and, remembering her father's words, 
she prayed long and earnestly for the dead poet. 

"Abandoned and rejected in life," she said, "like 
all great souls, he must not be neglected in death. 
God may hear the prayers of a child for the might- 
iest soul He has made for centuries." 

And she always prayed in the poet's own words, 
for they were as familiar as her Pater Noster, or 
Ave Maria, as no evening ever went by but she had 
to repeat one of the great cantos for her father. 
And she used to pray : 

Vergine madre, figlia, del tuo figlio, 
Umile ed alta piu che creatura, 
Termine fisso d'eterno consiglio. 
La tua benignita non pur soccorre 

A chi domanda, ma molte fiate 

Liberamente al domandar precorre. 
In te misericordia, in te pietate, 

In te magnificenza, in te s'aduna 

Quantumqiie in creatura e di bontate. 
Or questi, che dall' infima lacuna 

Deir universe infin qui ha vedute 

Le vite spiritali ad una ad una, 
Supplica a te, per grazia di virtute 

Tanto che possa con gli occhi levarsi 

Piu alto verso I'ultima salute ; 
Ed io, che mai per mio veder non arsi 

Pill ch'io fo per lo suo, tutti i miei preghi 

Ti porgo, e prego, che non sieno scarsi ; 
Perche tu ogni nube gli disleghi 

Di sua mortalita, coi preghi tuoi 
Si che il sommo piacer gli si dispieghi. 



Cedar Chips Forty-nine 



Mitts Srram 

Then, one soft summer evening, she fell asleep 
on the ahar steps immediately after her prayers; 
and she had a dream. She saw a great sea in the 
dawn-light, just waking up in the morning breeze, 
and fluted in long, gentle plaits, that caught the pink 
light from the burning East. And lo! across the 
waters came a tiny boat, propelled neither by sail 
nor oar; and standing in the prow was a Soul, — the 
Soul of a Woman, resplendent as the sun^ and glow- 
ing in its crystal transparency, for Bice saw the 
Morning Star through her vesture, as it lay low 
down in the horizon. And the boat and the Soul 
came towards the sleeping child, until the latter 
beckoned and said : 

"Come hither, O Child of Mercy, and enter with 
me. I have come for thee!" 

And Bice said : ''Who art thou ?" 

And the Soul answered : "I am the spirit of 
Beatrice. I have been sent for thee." 

And Bice answered : "I cannot go, for my father 
is old and feeble, and I may not leave him." 

And the Soul said : "It is imperative that thou 
come ; for thou alone boldest the keys of that place, 
where he, whom we love, is detained." 



P"'y Cedar Chips 



And Bice entered ; and they passed out over the 
shining waters that trembled beneath them, until 
they came to a shore, horrid with beetling crags, 
which seemed to touch the sky, and beneath whose 
feet the sea swelled and made no sound. And they 
rode on the waves to the mouth of a gloomy cavern, 
vast and impenetrable, for the front was closed by 
a great iron gate, whose bars seemed red with fire, 
or the rust of eternity. And behind the bars was 
the figure of the great poet, wrapped in his gloomy 
mantle as of old, and looking out over the shining 
sea with that same look of settled gloom and despair 
which Bice knew so well. And the Soul said : 

"Go forward, and open the gate, and liberate our 
Beloved !" 

But Bice wept, and said: "Alas! How can I? 
I am but a child, and the gate is heavy, and the task 
is grievous !" 



Cedar Chips Fifty-one 



Sltfr (Lma 2C?gB: CIt|arttg and Pragrr 

But the Soul said: "Loose the keys at thy 
girdle, and go forward!" 

And Bice found two keys at her cincture, and 
she loosed them. And one was marked "Charity," 
and it was of gold ; and the other was of silver, and 
the word "Prayer" was stamped thereon. And go- 
ing forward she fitted the former into the great 
rusty lock. The bolt shot backwards, but the gate 
would not yield. Then she fitted the silver key, and 
lo ! the great iron barrier swung back heavily. And 
entering, the child caught the poet's hand, and drew 
him forth. And the gate swung back with horrid 
clangor. And, entering the boat, the three sped 
forward rapidly towards the dawn, which is infinity, 
which is Heaven. And the poet, placing his hand 
on the child's head, said sweetly and solemnly : 

"Thrice blessed art thou, thou second Beatrice; 
for lo ! what my Beatrice accomplished but in vision, 
thou hast verily wrought!" 

"How now? how now? giovanetta mia!" said 
the aged sacristan, as he rattled his keys above the 
sleeping child. "What a strange couch hast thou 
chosen ! But sleep comes lightly to the young. 
Surge! filial bciiedicamiis Domino!" he shouted. 

He bent low and raised the face of the sleeping 
child. 

" Jesu ! Maria! but she is dead!" 



fifty-two Cedar Chips 



Even a philosopher cannot resist the temptation 
to sacrifice truth to an epigram. Even the mystical 
Schelling, perhaps because he was so mystical, could 
not resist the temptation. The reign of dogma, he 
says, that is, the religion of St. Peter, lasted up to 
the period of the German Reformation; the reign of 
grace, the religion of St. Paul, has continued from 
that time until now. Both are now superseded, and 
the time has come for the reign of Love, the religion 
of St. John. The first two clauses of the epigram 
are absurd and untrue. We wish we could say the 
reverse of the last ; but the time has not come. 
And, alas! the three clauses of the proposition are 
mutually contradictory and, therefore, unacceptable. 
If it were true that dogma had disappeared (the 
hope of all modern agnosticism), charity should 
disappear with it ; for all charity is founded on dog- 
ma — the sublime one that charity is charity, because 
God has ordained it amongst men, as a reflection of 
His own perfection. So, too, if grace disappeared, 
charity would likewise vanish ; for it is not by 
Nature, which is rapine, we love ; but by grace, 
which compels Nature into its own sweet ways, and 
files its teeth and claws. But it will be a great day 
for Humanity, when from pole to pole, and from 
zone to zone, the great brotherhood, and not the 
common brutehood of the race is proclaimed ; and 
all the world's weapons of war are piled at the foot 
of the Cross, never again to be assumed for aggres- 
sion or defence; for the former will be unknown 
and the latter unnecessary. 



Cedar Chips Fifty-ihree 



Qiift MxiUnmtm nf ^aw 

All the world's great thinkers have been dream- 
ing of this millennium of love. Philosophers have 
defined what it shall be. Its foundation, its internal 
economy, its laws and institutions, its administra- 
tion and executive— they have arranged all, there 
in their studies and laboratories. Every ethical 
system framed by great thinkers, from Aristotle to 
Spmoza, from Spinoza to Herbert Spencer, is con- 
structed with a view to the establishment of this 
Republic of Mankind. Poets dream of it, limn all 
Its beautiful features, chant its triumphs. Shelly 
visioned it as built upon cloud foundations, with 
walls of jasper, and ceilings of sapphire, and floors 
of chalcedony. Tennyson dreamed it more pro- 
saically : 

"When the war-drums throb no longer and the battle-flags 

are furled 
In the Parliament of men, the Federation of the World." 

Political economists strain their eyes towards the 
fair vision, and every theory, Malthusian and other, 
is directed towards its final fulfilment. Philan- 
thropists and Christian Socialists build this common- 
wealth in miniature ; and "Brook Farms" and Mor- 
mon settlements are the temporary embodiments of 
this idea that is haunting humanity. Meanwhile 
the world wags on as usual. There is the same in- 
equahty in life's conditions, the same chasm between 
the rich and the poor, only ever deepening and ever 
widening in the process of the suns ; the same pov- 
erty and squalor, the same disease and crime. And 
the battle-drums are rolling, and the rifles are bark- 
ing as of yore. But the battle-flags are furled, not 
in the sleep of peace; but the all-grasping belliger- 
ent races, whilst coveting everything, have grown 
economical — in silk and honor ! 



f"'y-*°«» Cedar Chips 



And yet the solution of the problem, the realiza- 
tion of the dream, lie beneath men's hands, if men's 
eyes could only see them. But, as a sick man will 
have recourse to every kind of quackery, but refuse 
legitimate and certain remedies, so this civilization 
of ours, sick unto death, swallows every nostrum 
of charlatanry, and rejects the one infallible remedy. 
That remedy could never have been discovered by 
men. It is the revelation of God. It lies in the vol- 
untary sacrifice of the individual for the sake of 
the community; in the sacrifice of the class for the 
welfare of a nation ; in the sacrifice of the nation 
for the benefit of a race ; in the sacrifice of a race 
for the welfare of mankind. But so long as the in- 
dividual is self-seeking, and the nations strain for 
self-aggrandizement ; and man's life is not a labor 
according to the primal curse, which is its eternal 
blessing, but a warfare, with the victory to the 
strongest ; so long will the evolution of the race 
go forward, not towards final perfection, evolution 
from the survival of the fittest, but towards final 
destruction with the elimination of all that is sweet- 
est and most beautiful. And yet, in its fiercest and 
most aggressive spirit, the world would hardly 
choose to go back to Beresarks and Vikings, to 
Alarics and Attilas ! Yet, thitherwards most surely 
it is tending, in that neo-heathenism which sings the 
soft hymns of Christianity whilst pursuing its pagan 
career of conquest and aggression. 



Cedar Chips Rfty.five 



l^amtr and l^umiliJjj 

But here comes in the complex question : Can the 
really humble rule? And must there not be the 
pride of strength in those who are called to govern? 
The question concerns individuals, limited com- 
munities, whole nations. Is humility, self-efface- 
ment, a qualification for the father of a family, the 
superior of a religious house, the captain of a great 
army, the premier of a world-ruling parliament ? If 
it is, there seems to be no power of ruling which 
means the enforcement of one's own will on the 
will of others. A family, a community, a common- 
wealth, without a strong, self-reliant hand to guide 
It, lapses mto anarchy. On the other hand, how 
can humility consist with the absolute exercise of 
unlimited power? The problem may be put in other 
terms. We have seen how the world, and our lower 
nature, worship strength, even brute strength. We 
all admire the famous Abbot Sampson, who reduced 
an unruly community to order, defied a king, in- 
sisted on the rights of his order, braved force from 
without and rebellion from within. In our own 
days, the same hand that canonized Abbot Sampson 
deified Oliver Cromwell. Yet, if ever there was a 
brute, it was this latter adventurer. Say what we 
like, the vast majority of mankind worship brute 
force. "We like a strong man/' is the cry of every 
one. But it is the cry of a low nature, still akin to 
the brute and the serpent; or it is the norm and 
standard demand of an advanced and perfected civ- 
ilization. 



f'f'y-*"^ Cedar Chips 



OII|ararlpra in lirk^nB 

On the other hancl^ gentle, refined natures love 
simple and lowly lives, and humble and pleading ac- 
tions. That sentence in the "Sentimental Journey," 
in which Sterne depicts his own feelings, when the 
shamed Franciscan monk turned away and looked 
down at his brown, threadbare sleeve, finds a re- 
sponsive echo in all human hearts. The characters 
in the novels of that great dramatist, Dickens, which 
appeal most to our sympathy and love, are such 
humble beings as Tom Pinch, and Little Nell, and 
Little Dorrit, and Florence Dombey, and Peggotty, 
etc. Ah, yes ; but that is fiction. Precisely. But if 
we met these gentle, pleading beings in real life, 
would we feel similarly towards them? Yes, if we 
were like them, not otherwise. If we were simple, 
and lowly, and gentle, we would love them in flesh 
and blood, as well as we love their spectral fonns 
in literature. But if we were base and ignoble, if 
we worshipped strength and distinction, we would 
despise them heartily as beneath us. Why? Be- 
cause, in the solitude of our rooms we have no eye 
of public opinion upon us to rebuke us for our weak- 
ness in loving the weak. But, with the Argus eyes 
of society upon us, it would be a grave test of our 
integrity to walk a crowded street with the ragged 
companion of our school-days : or to stand up in a 
heated ball-room with the homefy rustic, and face 
a hundred eyes of criticism and contempt. 



Cedar Chips Fihy-»evea 



Q^i\s &trf ngtlj of liumilttg 

But the really humble can rule, and can rule 
with firmness and success, if unaggressive. There 
is a world of diflFerence between strength and ag- 
gression, between power and the pride of power. It 
is the sheathed strength, that underlies all real hu- 
mility, which we worship. And it will invariably 
be found that those meek, yielding characters, who 
never assert themselves, who willing efface them- 
selves, exhibit the fortitude of endurance and the 
swiftness of strong resource, when in crises of life 
and death, great personal or state em.ergencies, such 
qualities of mind and soul are demanded by the exi- 
gencies of the weak, or the panic of the pretentious 
and the boastful. And, if raised to power by the 
suffrages of subjects, or the command of some 
higher authority, they invariably develop unsus- 
pected resources of spiritual strength and agility ; 
whilst their sense of humility and self-nothingness 
prevents them from infringing on the rights of the 
weak. They can be imperative without being ag- 
gressive. They can guide without hurting. They 
can stretch forth the shepherd's crook and lead into 
line the vagrant and the self-willed without pluck- 
ing one wisp of wool or forcing one pitiful bleat. 
And they are content to govern and guide their own 
without throwing covetous eyes on alien property; 
or seeking in some reflex axiom, which is generally 
an unacknowledged sophism, an excuse for con- 
quest or aggression. 



fifty-eight Cedar Chips 



®I|t WmmpattntB at QIl|riBt 

Indeed, if we look close, we shall find that it is 
the Omnipotence of Christ, even more than His 
Mercy, that enchained the multitude and kept close 
to Him His most capricious disciples. "Show us a 
sign," was the cry of the curious and selfish mob. If 
our Lord had merely preached, He would have left 
no converts. If He had wrought miracles without 
having preached, He would have bequeathed to us 
no Gospel. It is His power that prevails. "He 
hath done all things well." It is His positive, dog- 
matic, assertive teaching that convinces. "Surely 
man never spake like this Man." The multitude 
wondered and worshipped. The chosen ones wor- 
shipped and loved. And we^ in the far-off times, 
we, too, are entrained amongst His worshippers and 
lovers, because we feel that here is Omnipotence; 
and that when all things else are as fragile as a 
broken reed, we can fall back upon and lean our 
weakness on the unyielding strength of Jesus Christ. 
And this awful commanding power was so unag- 
gressive. He smote no one — He coveted nothing. 
"Put up thy sword." It is the Meek and Lowly 
One, who holds in leash the elements of invincible 
might, that commands that instinct of admiration, 
which as well as pity is the first condition of love. 



Cedar Chips Fifty-nine 



(Jpunuaqup ? 

And yet, while we wonder at and worship His 
invincible power, it is the consciousness of its pos- 
session, rather than its arbitrary exercise, that de- 
mands our admiration. It is the reticence in speech, 
and the restraint in action, that we adore. And this 
exquisite self -balancing, this absence of all passion, 
the submission to calmness and reason, under the 
greatest provocation, were manifested towards His 
brethren more conspicuously than towards His Jew- 
ish enemies. 

I know nothing more pathetic than that sentence 
of the Evangelist: "He rebuked their incredulity." 
When ? Just as He was about to ascend into 
Heaven. Incredulity at such a moment, and after 
such experience ! 

Alas ! yes. They had seen Him put forth proof 
after proof of His Divinity in His many and mar- 
vellous miracles ; they had seen the wonder of His 
Death, and the splendors of His Resurrection ; they 
had marvelled at His divine equanimity, and it is not 
difficult to imagine their looks of bewildered admi- 
ration, curiosity, and doubt, as they saw to-day 
proofs of his Godhead, and to-morrow evidences of 
His Manhood ; He had appeared to them again and 
again after His Resurrection, spoken to them, eaten 
with them, to prove He was no spirit. And yet, 
weak and incredulous to the last moment, they stared 
at Him, there on the hillside of Olivet, with mute, 
blank, unintelligent wonder, until He was obliged to 
repeat that old formula of His pity and sorrow, "O 
stulti et tardi corde! Quousque! Quousquef" 
He rebuked their incredulity ; and then — a cloud 
hid Him from their sight. 



S«ty Cedar Chips 



(!Iani|U?BtB of Cttljriatianttg 

Paganism conquered by aggression. Christian- 
ity conquers by submission, and her victories are 
more lasting. Attila and Leo ; Gregory and Henry ; 
Napoleon and Pius VII ; Bismarck and Pius IX. 
What mighty duellists they were ; and how the fee- 
ble priests, in the end, by the might that is from 
above, prevailed over the mail-clad warriors, with 
their legions behind them. Yes ! the end is always 
certain; victory is to the just. But what almost in- 
finite patience is required to watch for that end, and 
to be satisfied with the fruition of victory ! For one 
naturally argues : Can victory give back all that we 
have lost by being unjustly assailed? Can it recom- 
pense us for the weary suspense, the sleepless anx- 
iety, the bruised feelings, the ignominy, the shame, 
the sorrow? And, on the other hand, will a mere 
black mark in the judgment-roll of History be ac- 
counted sufficient retribution for pride, injustice, 
and aggression? Doth not the whole man arise 
in protest against wrong? And is there not some- 
thing fiercer in the human heart in its revolt against 
injustice than the plaintive wail of the exiled Pon- 
tiff: "I have loved justice, and hated iniquity; 
therefore I die in exile"? 



Cedar Chips Sixty-one 



©n Eni^rHtatth is to STorgtup 

Human nature is unchangeable ; and to-day there 
are few who have been in contact with men, that 
do not suffer an almost irresistible temptation to de- 
spise them. The law of rapine, which is self, so 
predominates amongst them ; their little souls are 
held in leash by so fragile a tenement ; their time is so 
short; and they play their wretched little parts so 
badly, that one is tempted to hiss the whole com- 
pany from the stage forever. Human history is 
but a record of human weakness and brutality. The 
Cross has been planted in the Coliseum ; but the evil 
spirits that lashed with lust and fury the sixty thou- 
sand spectators, who seemed to drink with their 
eyes the blood of their victims, have sought better- 
swept and cleaner places. But they are by no means 
exorcised or banished from the earth. Let the bat- 
tlefields of the world, the cries of the oppressed, 
paeans of the victors, the broken hearts, the wrecked 
lives, testify to it. What then? Are we to grow 
impatient with these little minnies? Are we tc 
dream of a greater and stronger and more spiritual 
race than we behold on our planet? Perhaps so! 
Yet it would be better to restrain our judgments, 
and imitate "the soft yearnings of infinite pity," 
conscious that the key to the mystery of so much 
meanness and so much weakness is somewhere. 
"Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner!" 



Sixty-two Cedar Chips 



There was some meaning, then, in that half- 
comical remark of his cheerful friend to the melan- 
choly Johnson : "You are a philosopher, Dr. John- 
son. I have tried, too, in my time, to be a philoso- 
pher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was al- 
ways breaking in." That's just it! Cheerfulness 
and philosophy won't go hand in hand. The mo- 
ment you think, you begin to sink; just as a swim- 
mer afloat on the surface of the water has to strug- 
gle to save himself from sinking, if he attempts 
to draw the least breath. "The weight and burden 
of all this unintelligible world" is too much for us. 
We can only bear it by not thinking of it. Just as 
physical agony is not only tolerable, but actually 
forgotten, the moment the mind is abstracted by 
sleep, or greater absorption, or an anaesthetic ; so, if 
life is to be happy and pleasurable, we must cease 
to view it too closely, or to watch too minutely the 
ticking away of time, or the varied pulsations of 
everyday experience. Of course, there is a class 
set apart for these things — those "intellectually 
throned" ; they must suffer, but probably they have 
their reward. For ordinary mortals, it is wisest to 
face the little drama of each day with hopeful hearts, 
perform its duties, enjoy its pleasures, suffer its 
trials; and place the sum-total at the feet of Him 
who is the dramatic Censor of all the alternate 
tragedy and comedy into which life is divided. 



Cedar Chips Sixty-three 



©lip Pain of l^tgIj-SII|inktJtg 

Tt has been said, too, that the reading of a great 
book has a tendency to make the reader gloomy and 
despondent. Probably it puts so high an ideal be- 
fore him that he becomes quite discontented with 
the humdrum existence around him, and passes 
gradually from a first feeling of discontent to one of 
self-contempt, and a grave undervaluing of all that 
he had esteemed in others. It is a grave dis- 
turbance of homely, happy thoughts and cus- 
toms that were pursued with a certain feel- 
ing of satisfaction that there was no ob- 
ligation to reach higher. There is, of course, a 
certain exhilaration in feeling that we have seized 
on higher possibilities, and lighted ourselves to a 
higher plane. But then we bid good-bye to the 
pleasant valleys beneath us, where in humble associ- 
ations and with very commonplace views of life we 
had managed to jog along pleasantly through the 
greater part of life. Here, too, are there compen- 
sation and loss, the eternal interchange between 
the positive and negative forces of life. For high 
thought we have to sacrifice lowly pleasures ; for 
exaltation of mind we have to yield up content ; and 
whether the exchange is to our profit we shall never 
determine. But we must go on ; there is no halting, 
unless we wish to be crushed or pushed aside, or 
be faithless to our vocation. 



S^^-ioiiT Cedar Chips 



We had a big fire, last night. Something mys- 
terious woke me up from a deep sleep just as the 
clock was chiming midnight. It was some time be- 
fore I could gather my thoughts together. Then I 
noticed a curious light, palpitating against the blind 
of my northern window. I thought it was the moon, 
but instantly remembered that the moon never ap- 
pears in the northern horizon, and that the moon 
shines steadily, and not with this pulsating light. I 
rose up, and raised the blind. Across the river, and 
not two hundred yards away, the mill, a vast build- 
ing, six stories high, built as a flour mill, years be- 
fore American competition drove Irish flour even 
from Irish markets, was on fire. Every coign and 
crevice was caught in the flames, which leaped 
through its seventy windows and reared themselves 
thirty feet above the roof. I could feel the heat in 
my bedroom, but could not hear a sound. The wind 
blew from the east, and carried the roar of the con- 
flagration far out to the west, and over the river 
and beyond the trees. Not a soul was stirring, al- 
though the single street was lighted as if by a hun- 
dred electric arcs. The very dogs, which never 
cease barking on ordinary nights, were silent. I 
was anxious for my stables, and when I found these 
were safe, I roused the village. It was no easy 
task. They slept the sleep of innocence and exhaus- 
tion. Then they grew alarmed, and no wonder, for 
half the village is thatched, and nothing could have 
saved it if the wind blew from the north or west. 



Cedar Chips Sixty-five 



©tyr l^lamtts at 5^igl|t 

As it was, there was but one building imperilled, 
and that was the Convent, which lay right in the 
track of the burning debris that was flung high in 
the air from the seething cauldron beneath, and was 
then caught by the wind, and carried hundreds of 
yards in a westerly direction. We could see great 
flakes of fire falling on the Convent roofs, and lodg- 
ing in the branches of the trees around. It seemed 
only a matter of minutes before the whole building 
would be wrapped in fire and smoke. There were 
plenty of willing hands to help, however; and, al- 
though they had to dodge the burning flakes of slate 
and timber that fell noiselessly upon the grass, they 
soon extinguished the burning fragments on roof 
and trees ; and, in a few minutes, all danger was 
over. I returned home ; and, as there was no pos- 
sibility of sleep with such a conflagration lighting up 
the heavens and the earth, I went up into my gar- 
den, and sat down, and watched the flowers under 
that light I should probably never see again. 



Sixty-six Cedar Chips 



3n tt|e spring ianm 

There was no color, but a kind of soft brown at- 
mosphere over all. This was the reflection flung 
downwards from the heavy clouds overhead, which 
now were reddened as in a winter sunset, when the 
light falls lurid and glaring; and the angry sky 
forebodes stormy weather. The shadows were deep 
and black ; but, in the open this strange color hung 
down over all the garden-beds and tinted hyacinth, 
tulip, and daffodil in the same monastic and uni- 
form tints. Then, early in that spring morning, I 
noticed for the first time the meekness of the flow- 
ers. It had never struck me before. Now, they 
looked like little children awakened from sleep under 
a sudden terror ; and they seemed so helpless, so 
gentle, there whilst the horrors of the conflagration 
were round about them, and the roar and the flame 
were startling all the darkness of the night. I re- 
mained there till the faint Spring dawn lit up the 
eastern sky, and in a few moments dulled and almost 
extinguished the splendors of the furnace that had 
now become a well of redhot metals and stones. 
Presently, the sun arose; and all the flowers began 
to turn their gentle and wistful faces towards him. 
It was as the face of a mother bending over the 
cradle of children awakened in terror of the night. 



Cedar Chips Sixty-seven 



SFtjr MttkntBB of Mamtrs 

I have often studied that curious aspect of gen- 
tleness and meekness in flowers of which I have 
made mention before. Here, and here alone, is the 
lie given direct to the poet: 

For Nature is one with rapine. 

Whatever be said of bird, beast, fish, or insect, of 
which it may perhaps be true that they subsist by 
plunder and violence, here is the great exception. 
A little water and a little air, and behold! they per- 
from their part in the universe of things ; and not 
an unimportant part, if beauty and fragrance are es- 
sential ends in that great evolution that works up- 
wards from the clod to the star. And not only are 
they unaggressive, but they are infinitely forbear- 
ing and long-sufifering. Sky and earth and air com- 
bine against them ; and they suffer all meekly. The 
angry and wanton winds toss them to and fro ; the 
fierce whips of the rain lash them, till they droop 
their meek heads, and weep like chidden children ; 
the teeming earth sends up its little parasites, that 
heedless of beauty nestle beneath the loveliest leaf 
or stamen, and consume its vitality. There is no 
defence and no protest. It is as if an acid were 
flung on a panel by Angelico ; or a Murillo exposed 
to sun and rain. 

But no angry remonstrance arises from Man or 
Nature. The great mother is so prolific of her beau- 
ties, that no one heeds the prodigality and waste. 



Saty-eight Cedar Chips 



It is true indeed that there are carnivorous plants 
beneath the tropics ; and upas-leaves of death be- 
neath which the tiny animal creation, so destructive 
of flowers in temperate climates, suffer retributive 
justice from their victims. But then, everything is 
made fierce by that terrible tropical sun ; and the 
meekest things forego their natural inclinations be- 
neath his maddening influences. It is also true, I 
am told by experts, that the most gentle-seeming 
flowers exhale a poisonous, miasmatic breath, so 
that their sisters droop beneath their aromatic, but 
treacherous breathing. But these are exceptions, 
proving that the fairest things may be the most 
deadly ; and that, as we so often read in the his- 
tories of men, death may lurk in the vintage of the 
Apennines, sparkling through Venetian crystal. 
But I only speak of what I know, and that is that 
flowers are the fairest and gentlest things the Hand 
of God hath fashioned from His elements of Na- 
ture ; and one would almost hope they had souls to 
be reborn forever in the sunlit valleys of Paradise. 



Cedar Chips Sixty-nine 



2II|p Ifaulg of 3Firf 

One thing also I never realized before, — and that 
was the terrific beauty and loveliness of fire. Deal- 
ing with it in ordinary life, it is, I suppose, too much 
of a slave to us to command our admiration. It is 
only when it starts up and assumes the mastership, 
that we recognize its majestic, if destructive power. 
It is as if a company of galley-slaves broke their 
bounds, and carried ruin and terror all along before 
them ; then fell down lifeless under the ruin they 
had made. But it is a mighty element — all the more 
to be dreaded, because it is latent, yet operative 
everywhere — nay, it is the great central energy 
which everywhere works through space. That blue 
jet of flame in my grate is lighted by the sun; and 
it is diluted but real sun-force that lights this paper 
which I am just now darkening. The same mys- 
terious power has bleached the linen in my sleeve, 
and browned the cuticle of my hand. It has cooked 
that meat before me, and enamelled the plate on 
which it lies. It built the temples of the gods in 
Persia, for itself was the deity worshipped ; and in 
the Irish valleys it raised these dolmens and crom- 
lechs that have withstood the storms of three thou- 
sand years. 



Seventy Cedar Chips 



But if you would like to trace this mighty ele- 
ment, not on the earth, where its footsteps are so 
deeply impressed ; but even in the Heaven of Heav- 
ens, and through even immaterial things, such as 
human thought and the soul of man, up through 
the tortuous paths of philosophy, and even to the 
throne of the Eternal, read that wonderful treatise 
of Bishop Berkeley's, which he quaintly calls Siris. 
Here he takes you from the exudations of the pine- 
tree to their latent energies ; from these to their 
source, the Sun ; thence to Light and Fire, real and 
symbolical ; thence to first principles of Being, to 
first objects of worship; thence to Chaldsean re- 
ligions and Persian fire-temples ; or through Plato- 
nism to the Hebrew Prophecies and Psalms, where 
fire has always figured largely as symbol, as vesture, 
as metaphor; thence, again, through Pagan adum- 
brations of the Trinity up to the great central mys- 
tery of Creation, until in the highest altitudes of 
thought, he suddenly remembers its origin, and 
goes back to the homely virtues of tar- water. 



Cedar Chips Seventy-one 



Is there a more pathetic scene in literary biog- 
raphy than that which took place between Berkeley 
and Malebranche in the cell of the Oratorian in 
Paris? The fine old priest, with his wonderful 
ideas about God, bending over the pipkin on the fire 
that held the decoction that was to cure the inflam- 
mation of the lungs from which he was suffering; 
and the grave English philosopher, with his new 
idealism occupying every cranny and nook of his 
brain ! Malebranche could not accept such vision- 
ary notions as an explanation of the mystery of 
Being; and argued, reasoned, expostulated, whilst 
he stirred the medicine in the pipkin. His Gallic 
impetuosity was too much for him. Inflamed lungs 
will not stand much pressure even from philosophy. 
The phlegmatic Englishman hied him homeward 
to his country ; the Oratorian was dead in a few 
days, martyred by his devotion to what he deemed 
truth. 



Seventy-iwo Cedar Chips 



Talking of this beneficent, and symbolical, and 
dread element, I came across a curious expression 
a few days ago. On turning over the leaves of cer- 
tain autobiographies of famous persons, I saw that 
one of them gave, under the head of "Recreations," 
the following: 

"Variation of occupation, playing with fire," etc. 
How did he amuse himself playing with fire? Did 
he swallows live-hot coals, like a stage-conjuror, or 
put a lighted candle in his mouth, as we all did 
when we were boys, or was he an amateur pyro- 
technist, amusing himself in his back-garden on 
winter nights, and delighting all the small boys in 
his neighborhood? I suspect there was a little af- 
fectation in this "playing with fire," as indeed there 
is in most autobiographies. I remember how af- 
fected I used to be by Carlyle's letters to his wife, 
until I found she accused him of writing all these 
affectionate epistles with a view to their future pub- 
lication, and for the edification of posterity. But 
I came across one little note, which was thoroughly 
naive and genuine ; and another which was pathetic. 
The former was written by a lady-authoress ; and a 
very distinguished one. Under the head of "Rec- 
reations," she mentions three things : Reading, 
writing and — talking! God bless her! There's no 
nonsense there ! No "archaeological explorations," 
"Alpine climbing," "deciphering Assyrian inscrip- 
tions ;" but "talking," a plain, honest avowal of a 
harmless amusement. 



Cedar Chips Seventy-lhree 



I would give a good deal to be one of the circle 
around the tea-table of that lady, some winter night, 
when the wind was threatening the final cataclysm 
on all things outside, and the merry blazes were 
dancing up the chimney — you know the rest ! The 
ghost of Dickens rises up before me, with a raised 
forefinger. "I have said all that a thousand times 
better than you." God bless you, Charles! So 
you have; and made us all your debtors forever! 
But let us suppose a Dickens' picture, and that 
good lady presiding; and let us suppose that she 
has done the honors, and is now free — to talk. I 
can imagine myself listening in the shade of a great 
lamp, or under the shelter of a Grand piano — list- 
ening, listening, whilst the stream of calm, graceful 
eloquence rolled smoothly from that lady's lips. 
And, if I am to judge by her written language, it 
is no idle gossip either ; but gentle, liberal views 
on things and places and persons, that are very in- 
teresting; of strange scenes she has visited abroad, 
of distinguished persons she has met, of rare intel- 
lectual tournaments between the giants of intellect 
of our own day ; and not a word to wound charity. 
For, where Intellect rules, Charity is always invio- 
late. 



Seventy.four Q^^^^ C^Jps 



3ln ^armtr iSaga 

The pathos in these brief autobiographies came 
in thus : 

^'Recreations: In former days, golfing and ten- 
nis, cycling and swimming." — Alas ! my poor friend, 
going down the slope of life, thou must now take 
things gently. Thou hast no longer the elasticity 
of spirit, nor the suppleness of limb, nor that elan, 
which helped thee in youth to despise consequences 
and rush at the immediate. That twinge in thy 
shoulder reminds thee that tennis-bats and golf- 
mallets cannot now be swung with impunity ; and 
a fall from a cycle, in former days to be laughed at 
as a trifle, might mean something serious now. In 
fact, friend, thou hast passed under the ferule of 
that dread schoolmaster, experience ; and his lessons 
there is no despising nor ignoring. Thou hast the 
heart of a boy, for I perceive there is a note of ad- 
miration, the admiration of regret, beneath that 
phrase in former days; but thou hast the mind of a 
man, tutored and experienced by many a rough 
accident in the uphill struggle of life; and thou art 
conquered! The splendid disdain of youth has van- 
ished ; thou hast learned to respect destiny ; and thou 
hast become cautious, and let us hope modest withal. 



Cedar Chips Seventy-five 



Uta Solornaa 

But is all this regrettable? Certainly not. The 
best part of life is unquestionably its decline, just 
as the mellow autumn is the fruit-bearer and peace 
harbinger of the year. I cannot for a moment envy 
these young athletes who sweep past my window 
here, flash across my vision for a moment and are 
gone. I feel glad of their courage, their splendid 
animal spirits, the exhilaration of youth and exer- 
cise, their enjoyment of the living present. But I 
do not envy them. I never go into a school-room 
without half wishing, like John Bright, to shed a 
tear over these young lives, with all the dread prob- 
lems of life before them. Hence, too, I think we 
should pour into these young lives all the wine and 
oil of gladness we may, consistently with the disci- 
pline that will fit them for the future struggle. I 
cannot bear to see a child weeping. I almost feel, 
like Cardinal Manning, that "every tear shed by a 
child is a blood-stain on the earth." Yes! give them 
all the enjoyment they can hold. The struggle is 
before them. The ascending slope of life is a Via 
Dolorosa, a mounting of Calvary heights, if not an 
actual crucifixion. Want, despair, sin, sickness, dis- 
appointment, are waiting in the hidden caverns to 
leap out and v/aylay them. And many, how many? 
will fall by the wayside, and find in the arms of 
merciful death, the final relief from the struggle and 
burden of life. 



Seventy-sk Cedar Chips 



®i|f Sitpning of ICtff 

Hence, undoubtedly, the evening of life is best. 
We have toilfully mounted the hillside; the setting 
sun is behind us, and soon we, too, shall go down 
into the great sea to awake again, we hope, in the 
dawn of a brighter morrow. Many of our comrades 
have fallen by the way ; we regret them, we think 
gently and compassionately of them, but we cannot 
help just a little self-complacency in the reflection 
that we have emerged victorious on the summit of 
life, whilst so many have fainted by the way. We 
have realized at least, too, that the worries of life 
are mere incidents — the inevitable concomitants of 
an imperfect state of being; and we now make no 
more of them than of the wind-buffetings and the 
rain-drenchings that brought the color to our cheeks 
and sent the warm blood leaping through every 
capillary and nerve of our system. Yes ! youth is 
the preparation for age ; age is the fruition of youth. 
How well that kindly optimist, Robert Browning, 
knew it : 

Grow old along with me ! 

The best is 3'et to be, 

The last of life, for which the first was made; 

Our times are in His hand, 

Who saith, "A whole I planned, 

Youth shows but half: trust God: 

See all ; nor be afraid !" 



Cedar Chips Seventy-seven 



©II? Sarttf (Hurt 

And then, behind all and crowning all, there re- 
mains the Earth-Cure — the great solemn enfolding 
in the arms of Mother Nature of her weary and 
worn children. From her breast they sprang, little 
jets of organic life, and mounted higher and higher 
in the sun and light, making sweet sprays of pearls 
as the sunshine caught them and played with their 
crystal splendors ; or, alas ! perhaps, muddy and 
discolored from a too great mixture of clay. But, 
clear or turbid, they have touched their altitudes, 
and now break lower down and lower, until they 
are caught to the breast of Mother Nature again, 
and lost in her final embrace. And she is merciful, 
and knows nothing of her weak or wayward chil- 
dren. She folds them up with all their perverse- 
ness, and gently covers them all over, and is silent, 
till they pass into the charity of oblivion. But, 
meanwhile, she puts forth her tender grass and wild 
flowers above the most erring as well as the most 
faithful of her children ; and allows her willows to 
weep downward, and her ubiquitous ivy to drape 
their headstones, as if even these were too loud- 
tongued for her wishes ; and;, as if in answer to the 
poor querulous desire of mortals to be remembered, 
she allows Time to pass his iron finger across their 
names, and whispers, ''Be forgotten, be forgiven, 
and rest!" 



Seventy-eight Q^^^^ Q^^^^ 



Smplortng pparr 

But here Mother Church breaks with Mother 
Nature, and emphatically demands some perpetu- 
ation of Memory. She will not silence the pitiful 
pleadings from the tomb. All is not over. And 
all is not at rest as yet. The weary brain is stilled ; 
no more troublous and restless thoughts flash across 
it. The limbs are at rest. No pains shall evermore 
rack them ; no pleasure disturb them. But the spark 
of the Divinity which they imprisoned is still pur- 
suing its way, through penal fires and across the 
dark airs of other worlds to its final resting-place 
whence it set out; and it seeks peace, peace and 
rest! Even the rather libertine fancies of Lord 
Byron were touched by the simple. Christian epi- 
taphs in the cemetery at Ferrara : 

Martini Luigi 
Implora Pace, 

Lucrczia Picini 
Implora Eterna Quiete. 

"The dead had had enough of life," he says, "and 
all they wanted was rest, and that they implore! 
There is all the helplessness, and humble hope, and 
deathlike prayer, that can arise from the grave — 
'implora pace.' I hope whoever will survive me, and 
shall see me put in the foreigners' burying-ground 
at the Lido, within the fortress by the Adriatic, will 
see these two words, and no more, put over me." 



Cedar Chips Seventy-nine 



^imilarttg uf 3FraturpH 

There is a curious similarity, not only between 
the thoughts that surge through the minds of men; 
but even between the physical features of many who, 
for good or ill. have left the impress of their pres- 
ence on the world. There is a startling resemblance, 
for example, between the faces of two beings so ut- 
terly dissimilar as Voltaire and the Cure of Ars ; be- 
tween Rabelais and St. Benedict Joseph Labre ; be- 
tween Savonarola and George Eliot. How is it ac- 
counted for ? Were both originally cast in the same 
physical and mental mould ; then when the latter 
came to be acted upon by outer influences, it yielded 
to the pressure ; and whilst the facial expression re- 
mained unchanged, as the flesh is less plastic than 
the spirit, the spiritual elements were shaped into 
the symmetry of the Saint or the distorted linea- 
ments of an abortive or misshapen genius ? Yet, the 
similarity is startling, although there is certainly in 
the face of the Saints a curious enamelling, a sur- 
face of sanctified beauty, that make the wrinkles 
beneath something far different from those that 
thought has indented on the face of the philoso- 
pher ! 



E'g^^^y Cedar Chips 



Irnrlitrt 3- IGabrp 

Benedict Joseph Labre! Saint? Yes. Canon- 
ized? Yes. The superb defiance flung by the great 
Empire Church in the face of modern Sybaritism! 
I confess to a certain sense of shrinking and squeam- 
ishness every time I stumbled across the words 
"crosus insectis/' in the lessons of the Second Noc- 
turne of his Office. I could not understand it. Is 
not cleanliness next to godliness? What about St. 
Bernard's: "T love poetry, but not dirt?" And 
St. Jerome? Were not all our dear Saints remark- 
able for this exquisite sense of corporal, as symbol- 
ical of internal, purity? And are not all our mo- 
nastic, and conventual institutions, spotless and 
speckless. from attic to cellar? Would not a young 
postulant, in any of our nunneries, be promptly dis- 
missed for the least symptoms of untidiness? And 
here is a beggar, a tramp, with just enough rags to 
cover him, but not to protect him, and these filthy 
in the extreme, raised on the altars of the Church 
for the veneration of the faithful! What about the 
Church keeping abreast of progress, and leavening 
civilization, when she defiantly canonizes this re- 
volting pilgrim and vagrant, who repudiates every 
canon of sanitary science, and goes around, from 
shrine to shrine, with his rags and vermin, in the 
days of Russian and Turkish baths, massage, super- 
fine lingerie, and vermicides, and insecticides ad in- 
finitum! 



Cedar Chips Eighty-one 



It was as great and as interesting a problem as 
Free-will and Fore-knowledge, Ideas Innate or Ac- 
quired^ or any other psychological ciuestion that 
might interest the ever inquisitive mind of man. I 
thought I should probe it to the end. I took up 
his life, written, mirabile dictu! by the superfine 
Anglican converts of the 'forties. It seemed to make 
matters infinitely worse. The habits of this Saint 
were simply appalling. He was a moving mass of 
vermin. He slept on dunghills. He ate the refuse 
of the poorest Italian cabins. He refused bread, 
and lived on cabbage stalks, orange-peel, and frag- 
ments of culinary refuse. Abominable! Loath- 
some ! No, my curled and perfumed and unguented 
friend! Is there not something in Scripture about 
certain people that resemble platters, well cleaned 
on the outside, but very filthy within? And some- 
thing about whited sepulchres? May it not happen 
also that this strange loathsome figure, externally 
defiled, may have a splendor and purity all his own ; 
and that He who sees beneath the surface of things 
may discern sanctities beneath these grewsome sur- 
roundings, that would compel Him to send His 
angels from the high heavens to guard so resplendent 
a soul in so humble and defiled a tabernacle ? 



^k^^y-i^o CeJar Chips 



^iB Purttg nnh Hfumtlttg 

Defiled? No. I retract that word. There was 
no defilement there. Nothing but the most exqui- 
site and delicate purity of soul and body, so exquisite 
that it is almost certain this Saint never lost his bap- 
tismal innocence, and kept absolutely free during 
his short life from that particular ensoiling which 
is especially antagonistic to Christian holiness and 
sanctity. His humility was perfect. When fine 
ladies stood up from the altar rails and retired (we 
cannot blame them), when the Saint approached to 
receive Holy Communion^ he bore the reproach with 
meek dignity, and besought the ])riest to communi- 
cate him apart from the congregation. He rejoiced 
that men shrank from him and loathed him. He 
sought humiliations as fools sought honors ; he 
courted affronts, as men court flattery. Modest, 
mortified, chaste as an angel, mortified more than 
Anthony, more hidden than an Alexis, as meek as 
Francis de Sales, as seraphic as the angel of Assisi 
— how now the ethereal splendors of his beautiful 
soul shine through the tattered and broken integu- 
ment of flesh and garments ; and consecrate, as by 
some liturgical unction, the very things which 
seemed to the purely natural man an offense and a 
scandal to society ! 



Cedar Chips Elghty-ihree 



This poor beggar died. He was picked up from 
the streets, fainting, and carried to a neighboring 
house. He never recovered. He passed out of the 
visible world, and saw God ! And then ? And 
then, all Rome went wild about the dead vSaint. 
There was a tumult in the Eternal City. Messen- 
ger boys ran wildly through the streets crying : The 
Saint is dead ! The Saint is dead ! Crowds 
thronged the chamber where he lay, with the beati- 
tude of Heaven on his face. The fine ladies who 
had shrunk away as he passed and gathered up 
closely their perfumed silks, actually fought for one 
of those vile rags, which seemed so loathsome on 
the living frame ; but were now converted by the 
magic of death, into precious relics tO' be kept in all 
their sordidness, and honored, both as souvenirs and 
talismans. The cry went forth demanding his can- 
onization. Miracles are wrought by the dead body, 
as erstwhile by the living. He is beautified, and 
known as the Blessed Benedict Joseph for a cen- 
tury. And, finally, the great Pope, the reconciler of 
civilization and the Church, the writer of the great 
Encyclicals, and the sublime Carmina, the stately 
representative of all that is most cultured and re- 
fined in Catholicity, puts his final imprimatur on the 
pilgrim and the beggar, and confirms the verdict of 
the faithful by the official canonization of the 
Church. And this in the very teeth of the greatest 
of all the centuries ! 



^'g'^ty-f"""' Cedar Chips 



®t|r Stairs far (Hanttmpt 

What a strange, sublime, unhuman thing is that 
saintly desire for contempt! It is a reversal of all 
the processes and passions of men. Nine hundred 
and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety- 
nine human beings are consumed with the desire for 
honor, for human respect, for the esteem of their 
fellow-beings. The passion is universal and in- 
tense. The courage of the warrior, the ambition of 
the statesman, the vanity of the poet, the slavery to 
fashion, the delirium of love — all are created and 
stimulated by that one central desire — the esteem of 
men. And lo ! here is one who, without affectation 
or hypocrisy, segregates himself from humanity, 
and places himself in the dust beneath the feet of 
men on the highways of the world. They take him 
at his word, trample on him, despise him, mock at 
him, leave him finally a mass of bruised compost; 
and then in the awful revelation of death they dis- 
cern the Saint, the peculiar one, and they go on their 
knees, and lift up the bruised and mangled figure, 
and kiss the wounds they themselves have made, 
and almost dismember it in their passion for relics ; 
and finally clamor to the great High-Priest at Rome 
to elevate that bruised figure on the altars of the 
Church, and to say that it was sacrosanct and holy. 
And, perhaps, under all this enthusiasm may be dis- 
cerned that very vanity and self-seeking to which the 
life and death of the Saint were the keenest re- 
proach. 



Cedar Chips Eighty-five 



(EntmnanJiiing iEatrrm 

But often (it should be oftener), those meek, 
self-effacing spirits, who think the potsherds and 
dunghills too good for them, do command esteem 
even in this world. I can imagine with reverence 
and awe, the smitten monk, leaving his stall at a 
nod, and going up humbly to prostrate himself be- 
fore the altar. I can imagine the Sister sharply 
chidden in Chapter, the hot blood mounting to the 
cheek and brow, but sternly ordered back by the 
voice of humility ; and I can see the smile, genuine 
and unaffected, with which that hurt and grieved 
soul will immediately afterwards do some little 
kindly, humble office for the one that smote her. 
These are the things that bring us to our knees, and 
compel us to kiss the ground where saints have trod. 
And if we ourselves are yet unchastened, and would 
quiver beneath the rod, at least it is something to 
know that we can reverence in others what is want- 
ing to ourselves. Thank God ! no one yet, however 
antagonistic to the Church, has ever ventured to 
paint a sullen monk or an angry and disobedient 
nun. It is a negative tribute to the genuineness of 
Catholicity, as the religion of Christ. 



^s^^-^^ Cedar Chips 



©I|ie 3uiigmpnta nf Mtn 

But what about the folly of the majority, who 
pursue this phantom ; and even stretch their moul- 
dering hands from the grave to grasp it. Brought 
to the test of reason, can there be anything so ridic- 
ulous as to seek the good opinion of fellow-mortals 
like ourselves? For. mark you, we seldom deceive 
ourselves as to our own insignificance. Whatever 
we appear or try to appear before the world, we 
cast a true, too true a reflection on the deep mirror 
of our own souls. And there we are not flattered. 
How do we measure otir opinion of others. As a 
something not to be noted. Did we hear that a far- 
off author, or singer, or painter, was distressed by 
our poor opinion of him, it would make him simply 
ridiculous in our eyes, however flattering to our 
vanity it might be. And how does the judgment of 
others upon us differ from our judgment upon them? 
Not by a hair's breadth. But are quantities not 
to be taken into account by any sensible man ? For, 
what am I, or you, or any one, to nine-tenths of 
those who have heard of us? A name — a certain 
collocation of a few letters, and no more. Of the I, 
or the Thou, they know nothing, or care less. A 
fall in stocks, a gray hair, an ill-fitting frock, is of 
far more consequence. 



Cedar Chips Eighty-seven 



Why then are we disturbed, elated, or depressed, 
by praise or contempt? Why, but because passion 
is more with us than reason, to say nothing of grace. 
Argue as we will, this human opinion weighs with 
us. It should not disturb the serenity of our 
thoughts even for an instant. Nay, even if one of 
those passionate, incontinent, undisciplined spirits 
should loom upon us out of his welcome invisibil- 
ity, and say to our face what others speak against 
our mere name, how should it affect us? Clearly 
not at all ! Let the creature carry his half-inartic- 
ulate, savage hate away with him into the darkness 
again! He has come like a shadow, and like a 
shadow he departs. Let his evil words pass with 
him. Let them haunt his soul, and not thine. Thus, 
too, we should allow that most uncouth being, the 
flatterer, to depart. Let the treacle stick to his 
soul, and not to thine. Ay, but can we? Yes! if 
we were all saints and philosophers. Aye! but if 
we were all saints and philosophers, would the 
wheels of the universe continue to revolve? 



Eighty-eight Cedar Chips 



^Eunting in (iirpat CHittpa 

I think the city twilights are the most pathetic 
of all. The sinking yellow sun streaming along 
such great thoroughfares as Trafalgar Square 
and the Strand in London ; or down along the 
Champs Elysees in Paris, and lingering on win- 
dow, or column, or roof, has an aspect of ex- 
treme loneliness, emphasized by the little, twinkling 
eyes of star-jets or arcs, in cafe or restaurant, or 
even beneath the solemn trees. Man is summoned 
from labor to rest ; and if one can pass by what he 
sees in the evening amusement of those "whose lines 
are cast in pleasant places," and watch the proleta- 
riat, the weary, bent, and broken masses of human- 
ity, shuffling by with hod or mattock on shoulder, 
and probably envying the "elect of the earth" who 
sit within their gorgeous clubs or cosy corners in the 
fashionable restaurant ; and then follow them further 
to their foul haunts in by-street or tenement house, 
and think of all the squalor and destitution and low 
mental and moral environments, one regrets that 
sunlight or twilight should pierce through and re- 
veal the surroundings of toiling humanity ; and 
would wish rather for the merciful darkness of 
winter that seems more in keeping with, and certain- 
ly covers more effectually, the sordid aspect which 
life turns towards her suffering and unhappy chil- 
dren. 



Cedar Chips Eighty-nine 



An 3lBlan& prtsntt 

This thought broke suddenly upon me (nor can 
I remove the haunting fascination of it to this day), 
one summer evening very many years ago. It was 
not in a great city, but on a sunny island, "a sum- 
mer isle of Eden," which, by some tasteless inge- 
nuity, had been made a penal settlement. A mission 
was being conducted there by Regulars from the 
city ; and we had been invited over to hear the 
convicts' confessions. It was pretty late when we 
finished, and on our way to dinner we had to pass 
through the dormitory or sleeping apartments of 
the prisoners. It was just five o'clock, and the 
summer sun was streaming across the bay, lighting 
up the headlands all around and the deep hulls of 
the ships, and casting great long shadows of build- 
ings, and masts, and wooded promontories across 
the darkening sea. All was sunshine, and life, and 
sweetness without ; all was darkness and desolation 
here. For we saw but strong cages, tier over tier, 
walls and partitions of corrugated iron, and a net 
of strong wire or iron in front of each cage, through 
which alone the little air, and the little light from the 
outer hall penetrated. Each cell was eight feet by 
four, and each, even at that early hour, on that sweet 
summer evening, had its human occupant. Some 
were in bed ; others sat drearily on the wretched, 
wooden stool and stared like wild beasts at us. All 
were locked in. It was a human menagerie. I 
have often seen prisoners since then, even under 
worse circumstances. But, somehow, those wire 
cages haunted my imagination. And then we 
stepped, free and unembarrassed, and honored by the 
very warders, who held in their hands the keys of 
these human cages. The summer sun was oppressive 
in its heat and light. A pleasure steamer, well filled 
with all the fashion and style of a great city, panted 
by. A band was playing. No one gave a thought 
to the entombment of their fellow-mortals just a 
few yards away. 



Ninety Cedar Chips 



Some evenings later, I too, was locked in at a 
comparatively early hour in some such solemn twi- 
light as I loved. It was at a Cistercian monastery. The 
bells had ceased their interminable tolling ; the rum- 
bling of the organ was hushed ; the pattering of feet 
had ceased ; the very birds, as if respecting the Trap- 
pist rule, were silent. I sat and looked out across 
the darkening twilight at the white statues glimmer- 
ing against the deep background of pines and laurels. 
If there be any spot on earth where there is peace, 
and rest, surely it is here. Some day, a tired world 
will demand monasticism as a luxury, or necessity. 
But that was not my thought as I sat there, and put 
my hand on some such work of Catholic philosophy, 
as the Imitation, or the Soliloqiiia of St. Augustine. 
My thoughts swiftly reverted to the penal settlement 
on the "isle of Eden" and the cages, and their occu- 
pants. What an enormous gulf separated one con- 
dition from the other ! There the one feeling upper- 
most was the degredation of humanity ; here, you 
experienced its elevation. It was the nadir and 
zenith of the race. And yet, the conditions of life 
did not differ so much. Nay, so far as physical 
comfort or enjoyment, the prisoners are much 
better off than the monks. The latter rise earlier, 
have much coarser and more meagre fare, work 
harder, keep perpetual silence, sleep on harder 
couches, submit to greater humiliations. And yet, 
there is the whole width of the horizon of heaven 
between them. There you pitied, or compassion- 
ated ; here you are reverent and envious. Despair 
seemed to hover over the prison ; but it is the wings 
of angels that lift the fringes of the pines that sen- 
tinel the mountain abbey. 



Cedar Chips Ninety- 



Aut patt, Aut Man 

But there is something more curious even than 
this. I should not like to say that those poor, squalid 
prisoners would gladly exchange their lot with the 
monks. That is doubtful. But there can be no 
doubt that the monks, if called upon, would assume 
the garb and chains of the felon, and in the terrible 
transmutation experience only the greater joy. And 
the attraction would be, the very degradation and 
contempt and loss of caste and honor, which is the 
peculiar lot of the convict. Does the world deem 
this credible? Well, we have proofs. If saints 
seek contempt as ordinary mortals seek honors ; if 
they have regarded themselves as the peripsema and 
offscouring of humanity; if they have begged to 
be laid on ashes in their dying moments ; or that they 
may be privileged to die on dunghills, remote from 
all human observation ; if a Vincent de Paul did go 
down to the galleys and sufifer the cannon-ball to be 
riveted to his ankles, as you can see in that famous 
picture by Bonnat — why may not all this be repeated, 
when the spirit and teachings of Christianity are the 
same, and when from countless human hearts, made 
invincible by charity rises ever and ever that prayer 
of St. Teresa, "Aiit pati, av.t niorif" 



Nineiy-two Cedar Chips 



uli|p Smmutahtiita of l^npp 

I wonder is the secret to be discovered in that 
saying of Emerson's : "The hope of man resides in 
the private heart, and what it can achieve by trans- 
lating that into sense. And that hope in our reason- 
able moments is always immense and refuses tO' be 
diminished by any deduction of experience." But 
that immutability of hope, my dear philosopher of 
Concord, demands the monk or the saint, or some 
such childlike and unspoiled temperament as thine 
own. The "deductions of experience" point all the 
other way. To keep one's heart unhardened until 
death is the achievement of a saint. Every stroke 
of the hammer of experience tends to anneal it. 
The two great impulses of nature, even in its lowest 
forms, are self-preservation and reproduction, and 
both demand the wisdom of the serpent more than 
the meekness of the dove. And these impulses are 
accentuated and intensified by experience. Every 
man stands solitary, with all other men's hands 
against him. He must fight for existence. Failure, 
defeat, is the one hell to be dreaded. Success is the 
supposed Elysium. Nay, all our modern systems 
of education tend thitherward. For what is all this 
terrible and complicated apparatus of education in- 
tended? What is the meaning of all this competi- 
tion, rivalry, gaining of prizes, etc.? What but the 
preparation for the greater struggle? And struggle 
means rivalry ; and rivalry, enmity. "One alone 
can attain supremacy." And that one must be thou, 
and no other. How are the best feelings of the 
heart translated into sense here ? 



Cedar Chips Ninety-lhree 



Nay, in such a struggle, where the watchword 
appears to be: "We neither ask, nor give quarter!" 
would not the uncontrolled impulses of the heart be 
the great traitors? Could there be any hope of suc- 
cess for a man who would be, above all things, gen- 
erous, compassionate, self-sacrificing, kind? It is 
all right for you, my Croesus- friend, whom I see 
labelled "multi-millionaire and philanthropist!" You 
can be lavish now, as much as you please. Nay, you 
must get rid of much of that glittering ballast, else 
it will sink your stately argosy. For gold is a weighty 
metal, you know ; and you cannot steer well the ship 
of your fortunes so long as you have so much of 
a dead weight in the hold. But "philanthropist"? 
It is a pretty euphemism ; and I don't want to quarrel 
with it. But I should have liked to know how you 
fared in the good ship Argo, as you set out in pur- 
suit of the golden fleece. For I notice that Jason 
was very generous and considerate and pious to 
the gods, after his many adventures and trials. He 
built a splendid mausoleum to the island-king whom 
he accidentally killed ; and sacrificed a sheep or two, 
after he, in concert with the amiable enchantress, 
Medea, had strewn the waters of the Euxine with 
the dismembered remains of the young Absyrtus. 



Ninety-four Cedar Chips 



A (CnUpgtum (CtjriHtt 

I will suggest something to you, "multi-million- 
aire and philanthropist," which may obviate such 
expiations by suspending the possibility of your 
errors, at least for a lustrum. What would you 
think of building and endowing a new species of ed- 
ucational institution, to be called the Collegium 
Christi? It will have for its motto : S'cffacer; and 
"Bear ye one another's burdens" may be inscribed 
over the lecture-rostrums in the class-halls. It shall 
have all the latest appliances of science for the fur- 
ther conquest of Nature, and advancement of man- 
kind. The extirpation of disease, the destruction of 
social evils, the bridging of the mighty gulf between 
rich and poor, the lifting up of fallen humanity, the 
study of criminology from the standpoint of Christ, 
the ventilation of grievances not as subjects for 
parliamentary eloquence, but as subjects to be 
grappled with, and destroyed and removed — these 
shall form the curriculum of studies. We shall by 
no means exclude even Pagan ideals. You may have 
busts of Crates and Cincinnatus, but not of Croesus ; 
Minerva and Apollo may grace your corridors, but 
the long perspective must not be bounded by glitter- 
ing idola of Mammon and Plutus. For the former 
are merely symbols, and alas ! rarely pass beyond 
their symbolic state. But these latter are the clread 
divinities that haunt the steps of mankind from the 
cradle to the grave. 



Cedar Chips Ninety-fire 



Mn&k^h 3Farra 

But it is quite clear that to yield to heart im- 
pulses and generous emotions is to court failure in 
the struggle for existence, which has become with 
us synonymous with the struggle for wealth. Life 
is a masked ball, ending in success or failure. If 
you raise your domino, you might as well order your 
carriage, or droshky, or cab, and go home. You have 
revealed your identity, and the revelation is fatal. 
Unknown you might have moved safely amongst 
the unknown. But when everyone else knows you, 
whilst they remain unrevealed, what chance have 
you? You have lifted your visor in the tournament, 
and exposed yourself to deadly blows. Yes, get 
away from the tumult as quickly as you can ; and, 
with the experience of so terrible a lesson, get away 
amongst the world's anonymi, and hide yourself. 
Or take some other mask, and wear it closely ; and 
keep a close hand upon those traitorous, if generous 
emotions which are the fatal gifts of your heritage. 
It is all very melancholy ; yet it is consoling to know 
that men still have hearts to feel, and if they must 
stifle their appeals, they cannot altogether still their 
beatings. And, now and again, secretly and with 
misgivings, they may yield to the luxury of fine, 
pure emotions without the danger of ultimate be- 
trayal. 



N"«'y-*''' Cedar Chips 



Hence, if you want to know what a man really 
is, watch him alone in the company of children. 
Here he can show himself as he is, because here 
he has nothing to fear and nothing to gain. Else- 
v/here, even in the society of his intimates and rela- 
tions, he cannot reveal himself. Brother is a mys- 
tery to brother ; and father to child. In the drawing- 
room, in the council chamber, in the club, in the easy 
undress of an after-dinner, one would suppose that 
men are ofif their guard, and wear their hearts on 
their sleeves. No ! assuredly no ! Wherever there 
is a something to dread, the petals of the soul close 
in, as the petals of flowers at the coming of night ; 
and open reluctantly only when the light appears 
again. What a history of mankind in miniature 
is that little story of a certain Queen-Regent of 
France, who was down on her knees, groping around 
with hands and feet, playing Bo-peep with her 
little children in the nursery amidst shouts, and 
shrieking, and laughter. Suddenly the ambassador 
of a great state is announced. The mother stands 
suddenly erect, and is transformed into the Regent. 
Stately, and stifif^, and ceremonious, she steels her 
face against even a smile. That must be impenetra- 
ble. The domino is suddenly pulled down. She 
speaks in riddles, and answers in enigmas. She 
watches every line of his face to read it ; she heeds 
not his words. They mean nothing. So too with 
him. He is studying her eyes, her features. Both 
are playing a part ; and both know it. They separate 
with mutual compliments and distrust. He goes 
back to his cabinet and mutters : **A clever woman !" 
She goes back to her nursery, and resumes her play 
with her children. Here is the whole world in 
miniature. 



Cedar Chips Ninety-seven 



Pitiable! Yes, perhaps so! But, que voules- 
vous? You have outgrown your childhood, and 
mankind has got out of its nursery and small clothes. 
You talk pitifully of the world's childhood, of its 
myths, and legends, and superstitions. You speak 
of its heroes as of great big children of generous 
hearts and narrow minds. Your twentieth-centuried 
scientist is painfully like the grandiose hero of 
Locksley Hall : 

I to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious 

gains, 
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower 

pains. 

Yes ! he has gone a step higher. He is illuminat- 
ed. He has electric cars and railway murders. He 
has romantic novels and divorces. He has the Stock 
Exchange and suicides. We are moving at break- 
neck speed, and the wheel of existence revolves 
so rapidly but few gain the summit of the tire: 
the many are precipitated into the mire below. In- 
equalities between rich and poor yawn every day 
wider than the chaos between Dives and Lazarus. 
But on the wheel must go. He would be reputed a 
madman or, what is worse, an obscurantist, who, 
would cry: "Slow down, O wheel of life, and let 
the fallen arise ! There is room for all, within you 
and around you ! Slow down, or break into splin- 
tered wood and twisted iron in the end !" 



Ninety-eight Cedar Chips 



Why doesn't all the world come to Ireland at 
least for the few days of quiet breathing and torpor 
which summer brings, and which even the most ex- 
acting Shylock of the modern world must allow? 
If I were a Croesus-philanthropist, such as I have 
already described, I would take from out all the fac- 
tories and workshops of the world those pale me- 
chanics, those anaemic and wasted women, and bring 
them here. I would take them from the stifling 
atmosphere where they breathe poison, and fill their 
lungs with the strong, clean salt air from the sea. 
For the rumble and thunder of machinery I would 
give them the ever soothing sounds of winds and 
waves. For the smell of oil and rags, and the odors 
of streets and slums, I would give them the intoxi- 
cating perfume of winds odorous from their march 
over purple heather and yellow broom, and the 
subtle scents that breathe from seaweeds washed 
with brine^ and exhaling its sweetness and strength. 
And I would say to them: Here rest and forget! 
Plunge in these breakers, sleep on this heathy hill- 
ock ; read, and pause, and think all day ! The cares 
of life have no place here! They have "folded their 
tents like the Arabs." There is nothing over you 
here but the blue dome of Heaven, and the Eye of 
God looking through ! 



Cedar Chips Ninety-nme 



The English have long ago discovered these 
nooks of paradise on the Irish coast. They have so 
completely monopolized one or two down there in 
the kingdom of Kerry that they feel quite 
resentful since the natives have found out those 
beauty spots, and are actually courageous enough 
to demand a right to share them. And here on this 
wild coast you will see a solitary Briton, a bewilder- 
ed and almost panic-^stricken mortal, pale-faced, 
thinly bearded, spectacled, with the field glass slung 
around his shoulders and something like an alpen- 
stock in his hand. He looks rather fearfully around. 
He is outside civilization and he does not know what 
is going to happen. He is quite astonished at the 
temerity of these young gentlemen in white flannels, 
and these young ladies in tennis costume, swinging 
their bats gaily, as they mount the declivity towards 
the broad plateau above the sea. By and by, his 
nerves cool down ; and if he can pick up courage 
enough to answer your kindly greetings, you will 
find him a bright, clear, intelligent soul. He is just 
come from the Bodleian, or the British Museum. 
The smell of books and mummies hangs around him. 
He, too, needs the sea ! 



One hundred Cedar Chips 



But all these bronzed and ruddy Irish, with 
health and life in every movement, feet that spring 
lightly from the turf, clean, ruddy bodies, as you 
see when they plunge from rock or spring-board and 
cut their way, like natives of the element, across the 
sea, what are they doing here? Taking their holi- 
days ? There are no holidays in Ireland ; for every 
day is a holiday. We take the best out of life, and 
laugh at the world pursuing its phantoms across 
the weary wastes bleached with the bones of the un- 
successful and the fallen. We don't teach the philo- 
sophy of the schools well ; but we practise the philo- 
sophy of life perfectly. So thinks, evidently, my 
statuesque Englishman, whose nerves are somewhat 
startled by our exuberant spirits. So think these 
German lads, who, amazed at Irish generosity, be- 
lieve the donors of these innumerable sixpences, 
millionaires, although the donors may be as poor as 
themselves. So think these two lonely Italian broth- 
ers, who vend their pretty artistic naper-weights 
at fabulous prices. They are Garibaldians, if you 
please, brought up to believe that a government of 
priests is the worst in the world. They have been 
beaten into orthodoxy by the old Irish woman, who 
feeds them as if they were her own children, and 
thinks she has a right therefore to chastise their 
irreligion. But all carry back to their homes the 
idea that the Irish are the freest, gayest, most irre- 
sponsible people on the surface of the earth. 



Cedar Chips One hundred one 



It is evening here. The sun has just gone down 
over there towards America, with all the pomp and 
splendor of cloud curtains and aerial tapestries ; and 
the sea swings calm, acknowledging the prescriptive 
right of the vesperal-time to peace. The wealthy 
classes, who have just dined, the more modest peo- 
ple, who have just had tea, are all gathered pell- 
mell here before the handsome villas that crest the 
summit of these cliffs above the sea. Just here, 
inside the sea-wall, between two priests, sits an aged 
Archbishop, the weight of eighty winters bending 
his broad shoulders as he looks across the darkening 
bay and thinks of many things. Undeterred by rank 
or splendor, for there is a kind of glorious com- 
munion here, crowds of young lads and girls throng 
the sea-wall. A German band is playing Strauss 
and Waldteufel waltzes. But it is not dance music 
these Irish want. They demand the Licder of the 
Fatherland. For every penny they give for a waltz, 
they will give sixpence for a German song. A young 
Bavarian, fair-haired, blue-eyed, will oblige them. 
And there, above the Atlantic surges, on this wild 
coast, the strange, sweet melodies, learned far away 
in some woodman's hut in the Black Forest, are 
entrancing Irish hearts, which understand not a 
single articulate guttural or labial of the foreigners, 
but feel the magic of the music stealing their senses 
away. And then the strangers reciprocate. And a 
hundred voices sing: Come ba^k to Erin, mavour- 
neen, mavournecn! to the accompaniment of violon- 
cello and bassoon. 



One hundred two Cedar ChipS 



A 3Famtlg J^artg 

Passing along the corridor of my hotel that night 
on the way to my room I was accosted by a friend. 
After a few minutes' conversation he invited me to 
his room. Oysters and champagne? No. A game 
of nap? No. A whole family, three generations 
of them, were gathered into the father's bedroom. 
They were saying their night-prayers before sep- 
arating for the night. The aged grandmother was 
reciting the first decade of the Rosary as we entered. 
We knelt. When she had finished the decade, she 
looked around and said : "Alice, go out !" Alice was 
a tiny tot of seven summers. Grandmamma prompt- 
ly took up the recitation, repeated the form of the 
meditation, as found in Catholic prayer-books, and 
slowly and sweetly "gave out" the decade to the 
end. The grandmother looked around again and 
called out: "Go on, Willy!" Willy was the father, 
a gray-haired man of fifty-seven. To the mother's 
imagination he was but the child she carried in her 
arms half a century ago. Willy finished; and the 
aged mistress of ceremonies called out, now a grand- 
child, now the mother, until all were finished. Then 
the children kissed "good-night!" and departed. 
Across the yard, which is also garden, 

All night have the roses heard 

The flute, violin, bassoon ; 
All night has the casement jessamine stirred 

To the dancers dancing in tune. 

They kept me awake 

Till a silence fell with the waking bird 
And a hush with the setting moon. 



Cedar Chips One hundred three 



3I0 ®l|ia ti\B ^nlutinn? 

And this was the subject of my meditation the 
following morning, as I t:at in my perch there above 
the sea. Here is the world's great secret solved. 
Here is the dream of the gentle mystic, Novalis, 
realized. Not that the scheme has yet rounded to 
absolute perfection here. The material and subor- 
dinate element has to be developed as yet to sup- 
plement the spiritual forces that are alive and active. 
But all the possibilities of such a perfect scheme of 
human happiness as Novalis dreamed of, are here, — 
Nature with all her magic beauty. Art in embryo, but 
with every promise of speedy and perfect develop- 
ment, and Religion, holy and mysterious mother, 
overshadowing all. Comfort without wealth, perfect 
physical health without passion, ambition without 
cruelty, love without desire, the enjoyment of life 
without forgetfulness of eternity, the combination 
of temporal and spiritual interests, gaiety without 
levity, the laugh that never hurts, the smile that is 
never deceptive, — clean bodies, keen minds, pure 
hearts, — what better world can philosopher con- 
struct, or poet dream of? 



One hundred {our Cedar ChipS 



^ntcttBpettian anii J^^purnttr iCttrraturf 

The two things that seem to have preserved the 
buoyancy of this people hitherto are the total ab- 
sence of the habit of introspection, and their ignor- 
ance of the neurotic literature of the age. It is quite 
true that their feelings, with surprising and painful 
quickness, leap from depression to exaltation, and 
vice versa; but this swift succession of feeling is 
emotional, and not intellectual. Except on the 
occasion of confession, in which they are strongly 
advised to be brief and definite, they never look 
inwards to scrutinize motives or impulses. They 
know nothing of psychological analysis of them- 
selves, and they are content to measure others by 
what they see, without desiring to unveil and pry 
into the hidden sanctuary where rests that Holy of 
Holies — the human soul ! And hence there can be 
no morbidity here. They look, like children, at the 
surface of things, and as these surfaces are mostly 
smooth, and it is only beneath there is the ruffling 
of tempests, they are content to take life even so, 
and say, All is revealed, and all is well ! 



Cedar Chips One hundred five 



©I|r Hrltarlimrrz 

It is a negative constituent of happiness, too, 
that hitherto they have never heard of the strange, 
modern literature that, commencing v^ith this mor- 
bid anaysis of human thoughts and motives, ends 
in revolting realism and dreary pessimism. They 
know nothing of the Weltschmerz, have never heard 
of Parson Manders or Rosmer Solness, with his 
dreary verdict on his life: "As I look backwards, 
I have really built nothing, and sacrificed nothing 
to be able to build." Oswald Alving is yet a stran- 
ger ; and happily the sculptor, Rubek, with his Irene 
and Maia are unknown names. They would not 
class the creator of such types with Shakespere, 
even if they knew them. In fact, they are a healthy 
people, and just as they never will be taught to 
appreciate high venison or rotten Stilton, so, too, 
they have not reached as yet that intellectual status 
where nerves seem to be everything, and healthy 
thought is not only unrefined but morbid. In fact, 
some one has called it : 

Mundus mundulus in mundo imniundo. 



One hundred six Cedar ChipS 



mm m inm? 

Will all this last? Ah, there is the problem I 
am trying to solve here on this rock-shelf above the 
immaculate sea. Will not the Zeitgeist come along 
and seize these island people, as it has seized the 
world without? How can we stop the process of 
the suns, or turn back the hand on the dial of time? 
And if education has to advance, as it is advancing 
by leaps and bounds, must not the literature of in- 
trospection and bad nerves and pessimism creep in 
gradually, and affect the whole mental and moral 
life of the country? And then, what becomes of 
your physical and spiritual health, and the beautiful, 
happy balance and poise of faculties, neither en- 
ervated by disease nor warped by intellectual mis- 
direction ? It is a big problem ; and push it as far 
back as we like, it will loom up suddenly some day, 
and demand a solution ; or an unmolested influence, 
such as we see unhappily bearing bitter fruit in 
other and less favored lands. 



Cedar Chips One hundred seven 



An Amiti nr g'rnanrnur Slttipnaaiblr 

It is hard to imagine such a revolution in a 
nation's ideas as this supposes ; and, as I study this 
strange people, here in their humid climate and 
surrounded by a misty and melancholy ocean ; as I 
see them watching dreamily the sunsets over the 
western ocean, as only a poetic people may ; dancing 
in ball-rooms to-night until twelve o'clock ; reverent- 
ly worshipping at the morning Mass ; returning to 
their hotels, dripping brine from dress and hair ; 
spending the day in excursions and amusements, but 
always ending it in the parish church ; and, as I 
think you cannot move in any circle of society here, 
or change your location, or stir hand or foot with- 
out coming bolt upright against God ; I conclude 
that a genius so varied and exalted will never long 
suffer itself to be linked with the spirit of the age 
or any other spirit of darkness, but will always rise 
above mere materialism on the wings of the poetic 
idea, and always keep within touch of reality through 
its moral and religious instinct. I doubt if Ireland 
will ever produce an Amiel, or a Senancour, or a 
Rousseau. 



One hundred eight Cedar ChipS 



2II|r Mm of ^tttna 

But the Man of Letters will come; and the Man 
of Letters will always set himself in opposition to 
what he is pleased to designate sacerdotalism. Lit- 
erature and dogma have never yet been taught to 
go hand in hand. For Literature has a dogmatic 
influence of its own ; and believes its highest form 
to be the didactic. Unlike Art, whose central prin- 
ciple is "Art for its own sake alone," Liter- 
ature assumes and has assumed in all ages, 
but more especially in modern times, the 
privilege of "guide, philosopher, and friend" to the 
world. Hence, we find that the worst forms of 
literature are excused on the ground that they teach 
a lesson. "Anna Karenina," "Resurrection," 
"Ghosts," "Lourdes," '"Rome," "Paris," are all ser- 
mons, told with all the emphasis, not of voice and 
accent, but of a horrible realism that affects one's 
nerves more terribly than the most torrential elo- 
quence. And now that literature is pledged to 
preaching, it is doubtful if it ever will drop the role. 
And so the Man of Letters will come to Ireland, as 
he has come to France, to England, to Germany, and 
with him the seven other spirits, Zeitgeist, Welt- 
schmerz, etc., to abide and take up their home, or to 
be exorcised and banished summarily and forever! 



Cedar Chips One hundred nine 



And all the spirits have one enemy, and but one — 
the spirit of religion. This was the L'Infame of 
Voltaire, who dreaded it so much that he would 
banish from his republic of atheism even the ancil- 
lary arts of poetry and music and painting. Every- 
thing that savored of idealism, and appealed to 
aught but the senses, was ruthlessly ostracized. The 
fight in that unhappy country of his between the 
man of letters and the priest, between literature and 
dogma, lasts to this- day, with such lurid manifesta- 
tions, as French Revolutions, Carmagnoles, etc. 
Then came the man of letters in the shape of the 
scientist, also banishing from human thought every- 
thing that savored of the ideal, everything that 
could not be peered at in a microscope, or examined 
in a test tube. He has passed, too, but left his mark 
on the religious tone of England. Now comes the 
man of letters, with his religion of humanity, from 
the steppes of Russia to the Scandinavian moun- 
tains, and thence to the mud-dykes of Holland ; and 
he, too, comes in the name of religion, with priests 
and ritual and ceremonies — above all, with dogma — 
the dogma that man is supreme, and there is no one 
like him in heaven or on earth. 



One hundred ten Cedar Chips 



Slljta ^poplf of BrBting 

And I can forecast the time when this people of 
destiny, here by the wild seas of the north, and 
right in the gangway of the modern world, will have 
to face and examine the dogma of this modern litera- 
ture. Nay, I can even see certain vacillations and soul- 
tremblings under the magic of the sweet and delicious 
music of language, attuned and attenuated in ac- 
cordance with the canons of modern, perfect taste. 
But I know that the sturdy character of the people, 
stubborn after their eight hundred years of fight, 
and their religious instincts which nothing can up- 
root, and their power of adapting all that is best 
in life with all that is useful for eternity, and, above 
all, their sense of humor, will help them, after the 
first shock, to vibrate back towards their traditional 
and historical ideals, and finally settle down into the 
perfect poise of reason and religion combined. They 
never will accept literature as dogma ; but they may 
turn the tables, and make their dogmatic beliefs ex- 
pand into a world-wide literature. 



Cedar Chips One hundred eleven 



That is just the point. Can literature be made 
our ally, as it has hitherto been our enemy? Are 
literature and Catholic dogma irreconcilable? He 
would be a bold man who would assert it, with Cal- 
deron and Dante before his eyes. But we do not 
sut^ciently realize and understand that poetry, ro- 
mance, art — everything that idealizes, is on our side. 
If Voltaire banished from the republic of letters 
everything that savored of chivalry, enthusiasm, 
poetry, heroism, it is quite clear that these must have 
been recognized as the allies of religion. And when 
the inevitable reaction took place, one by one these 
ambassadors were recalled, and at length religion 
was accepted and enthroned in the very places where 
she had abdicated or been expelled. So, Walter 
Scott's Waverly Novels prepared the way for the 
Tractarian Movement, and became its initial im- 
pulse ; and Tieck, Novalis, the Schlegels, who form- 
ed the romantic school in Germany, prepared men's 
minds for Catholism by recalling the ancient glories 
that filled every city of Europe with churches and 
cathedrals, and the galleries of Italy with priceless 
and immortal art. 



One hundred twelve Cedar ChipS 



I have always to undergo a certain species of 
humiliation when I return home from the autumn 
holidays. People will ask: "Where did you go 
this year?" And I have to answer: "Only to Kilkee 
or Tramore!" Some gentle and modest questioner 
will say: "I hope you enjoyed yourself and had 
good weather." But there is a large and ever-grow- 
ing class, who, when they receive that reply, sudden- 
ly drop or change the conversation, as if it were too 
painful to be pursued. You know them well. They 
are the world-explorers or globe-trotters, who have 
climbed the Pyramids and seen the Iceland geysers ; 
who have glimpsed the interiors of the Lamaseries 
of Thibet, and visited Siberian prisons ; who have 
wondered (that is, if they can wonder at anything) 
at the giant recumbent statue of Buddha in Ceylon, 
and read Aztec inscriptions in the ruined temples of 
Mexico ; and to whom a dash at Constantinople or 
Cairo, or a run across the states to Vancouver, is 
considered a mere preliminary canter to a six- 
months' holiday across the planet. They are for- 
midable folk to meet; and modest people shrink 
away into a kind of coveted annihilation, until they 
get beyond the shadow of such experienced and 
ubiquitous neighbors. 



Cedar Chips One hundred thirteen 



There is a minor species of travelled people, 
however, who are more intolerant, and intolerable. 
They are the less enterprising, but more impressive 
holiday-makers, who are modest enough to admit 
that they have only climbed Mont Blanc and seen the 
Passion-Play ; but who always ask you with a sin- 
gular kind of pitiful contempt : "Is it possible you 
have never seen Spain? Really now you ought to 
go to Spain!" And you feel very humble, and in- 
deed half-criminal ; and you then and there resolve 
that your ultimate salvation depends on your having 
seen Spain, and that you must make the attempt, if 
it costs your life. And you regard these experienced 
people with a kind of admiring wonder; and think 
how unhappily nature has dealt with you in not 
inspiring you with such glorious and profitable am- 
bitions ; and endowing you instead with a kind of 
hopeless inertia, that makes the packing of a trunk, 
or the purchase of a Cook's ticket, a work to be 
dreaded and shunned. You admit how feebly you 
are equipped for life's serious work; and you make 
a desperate resolution that, come what will, you will 
see Spain and, — no, or die ! 



One hundred fourteen Cedar ChipS 



3fi ©ranrl a J^prwattg? 

On more sober reflection, however, and when 
the awful sense of your inferiority has vanished, 
you may be disposed to reflect ; and reflecting ask 
yourself, Is travelling abroad really essential to 
existence? or to health and long life? or to educa- 
tion? And is it some innate or congenital defect in 
your own nature that creates that repugnance to 
going abroad for your holidays? For really, it is 
just there that self-contempt comes in. And, as 
you reflect, you will probably recall the case of 
the vast multitudes who never leave their own coun- 
try, nay, their own village, or townland, and whose 
lives are quite as laborious as yours. Here are nuns, 
for example, who for fifty years have never gone 
outside these convent walls ; who have seen the same 
little span of sky, the same little patch of stars, dur- 
ing all that time ; whose lives have been lives of un- 
remitting labor, and who now, in the evening of life, 
take as cheerful an outlook over life and eternity as 
the most philosophical, or rather eupeptic, optimist. 
They listen to all recitals of foreign travels with a 
certain amount of interest^ but without much envy. 
They have been content to live, to work, and are 
content to die. And they have never known, even 
for a moment, that sensation of ennui which will at- 
tack people in the hotels of Cairo, or the seraglios of 
Stamboul. Clearly then, travelling abroad is not 
an essential of existence, or even of health. 



Cedar Chips One hundred fifteen 



K^rrttnua ilmtabilltg 

Then, again, here are three or four thousand 
people in this remote parish, whose lives, too, are 
draped in the same sober monotone of place and 
scene and unintermittent toil ; and somehow they 
never think it a necessity of existence to leave their 
homes, and see strange faces and foreign climes. 
And they live, and have perfect health and nerves 
and spirits, and thank God for His blessings, nay 
even for His visitations, when He does come to 
them under the disguise of sorrow. Moreover, our 
forefathers and our predecessors who had the same 
class of work to accomplish, with greater labor and 
more worries, never dreamed of an autumn holiday 
in France or Spain. And they lived to ripe old age, 
and dropped peacefully into peaceful graves. Ah, 
but! we get depressed, and the springs of all mental 
and bodily activity get dulled or broken, and the 
doctor says: "You must really go abroad and see 
strange faces and live vmder different circumstances, 
and pick up fresh elasticity of spirits by change, 
change!" Alas! it is the eternal question 
of nerves again. Nervous irritability is genius ; 
nervous ennui, heresy ; nervous literature, Ibsens 
and M?eterlincks ; and one and only one remedy, — 
which is never more than a palliative;, for the disease 
is deep-rooted — and that is change, change, change! 



One hundred sixicen Cedar ChipS 



But education? Is not travel here at least an 
essential ? This, too, may be doubted. How very 
few celebrities, after all, made the "grand tour" ! 
Did Shakespere or Spencer cross the English chan- 
nel? Of those who did venture abroad in those 
days, how many repeated the experiment? Even in 
our times, let it be remembered that Byron and 
Shelley, Eandor and Browning, were voluntary ex- 
iles, not travellers ; and that if George Eliot could 
not get on without her annual trip to the Continent, 
Tennyson on the other hand rarely ventured from 
home. And Carlyle — ah ! Carlyle, what it cost him 
to leave even his unhappy home at Chelsea, and get 
away amongst friends who were prepared to put 
pillows and roses under his nerve-distracted head! 
How he fumed and raged till he got back to his 
own dismal quarters again ! And the two or three 
continental trips ! Ach Gott! as he would say. Here 
is a specimen : 

"We got to Putbus, doing picturesquely the way. 
A beautiful Putbus indeed ; where I had such a night 
as should be long memorable to me; big loud hotel, 
sea-bathing, lodgers with their noises, including plen- 
teous coach-horses under my window, followed by 
noises of cats, brood-sows, and at 2 p. m. by tlie 
simultaneous explosion of two Cochin-China cocks, 
who continued to play henceforth, and left me what 
sleep you can fancy in such quarters. * * * * 
Adieu ! Keil Kissen. sloppy, greasy victual, all cold, 
too, especially the coffee and tea. Adieu, Teutsch- 
land! Adieu, travelling altogether, now and for- 
evennore!" 



Cedar Chios ^"^^ hundred seventeen 



Really, this kind of thing reconciles you to your 
lot, if you are unable, or unwilling, to leave your 
own land. And if you have the least experience in 
travelling, and understand ever so little of its wor- 
ries and annoyances, even in these days of luxury, 
you begin to think, that except for the extremely 
mercurial, who cannot sit still, and the extremely 
depressed, who require frequent change, the game 
is hardly worth the candle. For after all, in the 
whole of Europe this moment, bow many things 
are there which 3^ou would really like to see? I do 
not say, how many places and things are there which 
you would like to be able to boast you saw. But 
how many things, persons, places, do you really 
covet with the eyes of your imagination? Lord 
Bacon gives you a handsome list for selection. He 
tells every traveller what he ought to see. Here is 
the list : "The courts of princes, especially when 
they give audience to embassadors ; the courts of 
justice, while they sit and hear causes; ecclesiastical 
consistories ; the churches and monasteries, with the 
monuments which are therein extant ; the walls and 
fortifications of cities and towns ; havens and har- 
bors, antiquities and ruins, libraries, colleges^ dis- 
putations and lectures, shipping and navies ; houses 
and gardens of state and pleasure near great cities ; 
armories, arsenals, magazines, exchanges, bourses, 
warehouses, exercises of horsemanshop, fencing, 
soldiers and the like; comedies; treasures of jewels 
and robes ; cabinets and rarities ; and to conclude, 
whatever is memorable in the places where they go." 



One hundred eighteen Cedar ChipS 



Of all these, about nine-tenths, I should say, 
are inaccessible to the ordinary traveller. Of those 
that are accessible, I confess the churches and mon- 
asteries alone would interest me ; and one thing 
more, which the writer has omitted, — the haunts and 
graves of great men. The room in the Roman Col- 
lege where St. Aloysius died would have more at- 
traction for me than the Forum ; and the places con- 
secrated by the presence and ministrations of that 
sweet saint, Philip Neri, would drag me away from 
the spot Vv'here the mighty Caesar fell. I would of 
course visit the Colosseum, but I would see only 
the mangled remains of the young Christian ath- 
letes and virgins whose limbs were rent asunder 
down there in its arena for the name of Christ. 
And I would see it bv moonlight also, but only to 
observe the shadowy figures who steal through the 
dark aisles and gather for sacred burial these hal- 
lowed remains. I would not give one precious quar- 
ter of an hour that I might spend in the Sacred 
Catacombs, to study the ruins of Poestum, or trace 
the broken splendors of Hadrian's villa ; but I would 
rise with the dawn to be able to say Mass in that 
Mamertine prison, where the great apostles were 
incarcerated, and where they baptized their gaolers 
with the waters of that miraculous spring that flows 
there in the dark beneath my feet. 



Cedar Chips One hundred nineteen 

But education? We are wandering a little, as 
befits the subject. Travelling is essential to educa- 
tion? Perhaps so. But the most one can ever hope 
to extract from a travelled man is the exclamation : 
I sav^ that! For example: 

You. — "The Parthenon which after so many 
thousand years is yet the noblest temple — " 

Traveller. — "Oh, yes ! we saw the Parthenon, 
and the Acropolis!" 

You. — "It cannot be any longer maintained that 
the Moorish or Saracenic influence was hostile to 
the arts of civilization when that magnificent relic 
of their architecture, the Alhambra — " 

Traveller. — "The Alhambra ! Oh we saw the 
Alhambra ! 'Twas lovely !" 

You. — "And so if you want to see at their best 
Fountains' or Melrose — " 

Traveller. — "Oh, yes ! We were there. We 
saw both! They are exquisite !" 

You. — "I was just saying that if you want to 
see Fountains' or Melrose, visit them by moonlight. 
And you shall never know the vastness and sublim- 
ity of the Colosseum, until you startle the bats at 
midnight from its drapery of ivy, and — " 

Traveller. — "Oh, yes ! That's Byron, you know ! 
No, Scott! Let me see: 

If you would see the — hem — aright, 
Visit it by the pale moonlight. 

"Isn't that it? No? Well, then, 'twas Byron 
who said : 'Whilst stands the Colosseum,' etc., etc." 

Who does not remember those two little girls 
whom Ruskin has pilloried forever in his Fors Cla/v- 
igera, — who read trashy novels, and eat sugared 
lemons all the way between Venice and Verona, and 
whose only remarks on the scenery and associations 
were: 

"Don't those snow-caps make you cool?" 
"No— I wish they did." 

Are they types? 



One hundred twenty Cedar ChipS 



ISrntUprttnna of (Sraurl 

Ah, but the memory of people, places, scenes, 
you have beheld! Isn't that worth preserving? 
Yes ! I make the concession candidly. You have 
hit the bull's-eye this time. The memory of travel 
is the real gain and blessing of travel, just as our 
memories of youth, and middle-age, have a charm 
which our experiences did not possess. It is a curi- 
ous fact and well worth investigating. Sitting here 
by the fireside, the eye of memory travels with an 
acute, and a certain kind of pathetic pleasure, over 
all the accidents and vicissitudes of our long jour- 
ney. How little it makes of the worries and embar- 
rassments ; how greatly it enhances the pleasures. 
You smile now at the inconveniences of that long, 
dusty, tiresome railway journey, which you thought 
would never end ; at the incivility of the porters or 
waiters, who contemptuously passed you by for 
greater folk ; at the polite rudeness of the hotel- 
keeper, who told you at twelve o'clock at night, when 
you stumbled half -dazed from the railway carriage, 
that he had not a single room available ; at the long 
avenue of waiters and waitresses who filed along" 
the hotel corridor at your departure expectant of 
much backsheesh, and ungrateful for little; at the 
cold of Alpine heights, and the heat of Italian cities 
in the dog-days ; at the little black-eyed beggar who 
served your Mass for a bajocco, and turned somer- 
saults at the altar free gratis ; at the crush and the 
crowd, and the hustling and the elbowing in St. 
Peter's : at the awful extortions, made with the ut- 
most politeness, by those charming and intolerable 
natives ; of the eternal peculation by the bland and 
smiling officials, etc., etc. 



Cedar Chips One hundred twenty-one 



^nma IFram iKrmorg 

And you recall, with a pleasure you never felt 
in the experience., the long, amber-coloured ranges of 
snow-clad mountains sweeping into sight as the 
train rushes through horrid gorges, or creeps slow- 
ly up some Alpine spur that slopes its declivities to 
meet the demands of science ; the vast vistas of 
snow-white palaces above the ever-blue Mediterra- 
nean; the long days spent in the cool galleries face 
to face with immortal paintings ; the twilight of 
great churches with all their half -veiled splendors 
of marbles and pictures ; that evening, when you 
watched the sun set across the Val d'Arno, and the 
strange blue twilight crept down before it, deepened 
into the purple black of the night ; the hour you 
spent above the graves of Shelley and Keats be- 
neath the pyramid of Caius Cestius ; that organ re- 
cital in the great Italian Cathedral, when you 
thought you saw the heavens opened and the angels 
ascending and descending; the shock and terror at 
the sudden rocking of the earth at Sorrento; the 
cool quadrangle in the Dominican Convent, the 
play of the fountain, and the white-robed monks 
in the gallery overhead ; the home-coming ; the sight 
of ruddy English faces instead of the dusky, black- 
eyed Greek or Italian ; the unpacking of your treas- 
ures ; the steady settling down into the old groove 
of life, and the resumption of ancient habits. 



One hundred twenty-two Cedar ChioS 



There is no doubt but that here is pleasure, deep, 
unalloyed pleasure, independent of the vanity of 
being able to say : I was there ! How do you ac- 
count for it? Thus, my travelled friend! You 
see, wherever you went, you yourself were part and 
parcel of all you saw and felt, and you cast the 
shadow of self over all. And even a Lucretian phil- 
osopher will admit that self is the ever-present trou- 
ble, dimming and darkening all eternal splendors of 
space and time, and mingling its own bitter myrrh 
of thought and feeling with the brightest and most 
sparkling wine of life. Yes, you were worried here, 
and fretted there ; the memory of your little annoy- 
ance was fresh, and you took it with you ; and here 
you were the victim of weariness and ennui, and 
you sang Home, stveet home! in your heart. And 
your fellow-travellers, you remember, were some- 
times disagreeable. You did not get on well to- 
gether. It was all their fault, of course ; they were 
so horribly impatient, and even ignorant. What 
pleased you, displeased them. You would have 
wished to linger over that immortal canvas, which 
you knew you would never see again ; or you would 
have liked to try your imperfect Italian on that 
laughing little nigger who rolled out his musical 
language so softly as he twisted the macaroni be- 
tween his dirty fingers ; but you were hurried on, on 
by your friends, and you found it hard to forgive 
them. They wanted to linger over dainty goods in 
shop-windows here and there, or to listen to a bar- 
rel organ. You said, very naturally : Can't they see 
and hear these things at home? Why do such peo- 
ple ever travel abroad ? 



Cedar Chips One hundred twenty-three 



That, too, is simple of explanation. They have 
splendid physical health, and no minds worth speak- 
ing of. They cannot rest at home, just as the un- 
tamed animal spirits of a boy will not permit him 
to sit still for a moment. Now, Nature is a most 
even and impartial mother. She doles out her gifts 
with rigid impartiality. She has given some the af- 
fluence of great health and spirits, unburdened by 
imagination and unstinted by reflection. To others 
(shall we say they are her favorites?) she gives 
the superior gifts of mentality, with all the divine 
gloom and depression that invariably accompany 
them. The former, mercurial in temperament, race 
across Europe, dip here and there in some antique 
fountain of art or literature, but instantly shake off 
the dreaded beads of too much thought ; attend great 
ceremonies ; enjoy the three-hours' dinner at some 
palatial hotel ; are noisy and communicative, and 
happy. They return fresh from their travels to tell 
their acquaintances : "We have been there ! Really, 
now, you must go !" The others, if they can shake 
off the physical inertia which always accompanies 
and balances mental irritability, glide softly through 
Europe, linger over the spots sanctified by genius, 
spend quiet, dreamy hours in cool, shady galleries, 
avoid the big hotels, watch Nature in silence and 
the solitude of their hearts, and return to the winter 
fireside to embody in novel, or poem, their experi- 
ences, doubly hallowed in the light of memory. 
These are the men that make you despair, for they 
have the second-sight, the vision that rises with the 
dawn and haunts them till the dusk. 



One hundred twenty-four Cedar Chios 



Mtmar^ unb Art 

This enchantment of memory is really much the 
same as the enchantment of art. A beautiful pic- 
ture gives you more pleasure than the beautiful 
reality it represents. You dare not say it is greater, 
or more perfect, or more true than Nature ; but you 
feel greater pleasure in the contemplation of it 
than in the vision of the reality. Why? Because 
you are not a part of it. You see it from the out- 
side. Your personality forever jarring with itself 
and more or less out of tune, is not projected athwart 
it. You are a something apart : and you see it as a 
something that has no connection whatsoever with 
you. Hence its peace, its calm, its truth, are sooth- 
ing and restful. Or, if there be figures in the pic- 
ture, or something dramatic and striking, for ter- 
ror or for pathos, they do not touch you with any 
emotion but that of curiosity and pleasure. You 
are in a theatre, and this is the stage ; but the drama 
cannot touch you. That picture-frame, like that 
drop-scene, cuts you away from the representation. 
You are a spectator, not an actor. But in real life 
you cannot remain a spectator. Would to Heaven 
you could ! You will have touched the great secret 
of all human philosophy when you have brought to 
your mind, in its daily and hourly action, the con- 
viction that "Life is a stage^ and all men players 
and actors thereon." But this is impossible and 
undesirable. You must play your own part, and it 
is mostly a tragic and solemn one. 



Cedar Chips One hundred twenty-five 



This is the great secret of the happiness of 
childhood. Children are unconscious of themselves. 
They refer nothing to themselves. They hear of 
life, its vast issues, its tragedies, its trials, its v/eight 
of sorrows ; but they can never for a moment be- 
lieve that such things can afifect themselves. The 
little things that do trouble them, they pass lightly 
over and forget. The little injustices that are done 
them they immediately condone. They liave not 
as yet begun to refer all things in heaven and earth 
to themselves. They regard them as no part of 
their personality. Life is a picture — a pretty pic- 
ture in a gilt frame. It is a gorgeous drama, where 
they can sit in the pit, or the boxes, according to 
their position in life, and look on calmly at Blue 
Beard and his wives or the madness of Ophelia, or 
the smothering of Desdemona, while they crunch 
their caramels, or smear their faces with sugared 
fruit. Life is a pretty spectacle, created specially 
for their amusement. If any one were to say: 
"There are Blue Beards yet in the world, and you 
may yet be a wife; or, you may yet be an Ophelia, 
and carry around you bundles of rue; or, you may 
encounter your lago, and have your handkerchief 
stolen;" that child would laugh incredulously into 
your face. Unconsciousness and unbelief, or rather, 
all-trusting faith in its immunity from sin and sor- 
row, are the glorious charters of childhood ; as they 
are also symptoms of perfect, unbroken health. 



One hundred twenty-slx Cedar ChipS 



All (^rtat Mark Mnronsrioua 

The first moment of unrest, or subjectivity, or 
reference to ourselves, is the first moment also that 
marks our entrance on the stage of life; and it 
marks also the first step towards our failure. The 
unconscious actor is the greatest and the most per- 
fect. Is it not a maxim of the stage : Lose your own 
personality in the person you represent? If you 
are introspective, or self-examining, or curious to 
know what the audience is thinking of you, you will 
soon hear hisses and tumultuous condemnation. 
Just as in spiritual life the secret not only of sanc- 
tity but of happiness, is abandonment of self, and 
repose in God, so in our mere earthly life we must 
abandon ourselves to our inspirations, or fail. The 
poet who tries to be a poet, will never be a poet. He 
may be an artist, or polisher, or filer of sentences 
and phrases ; but he will always lack the higher af- 
flatus. The saint who thinks he is a saint, ceases 
to be a saint. The patriot who begins to ask, how the 
welfare of his country will affect himself, ceases 
then and there to be a patriot. All great work is 
unconscious, and above all, unegotistical. The mo- 
ment it becomes conscious, it becomes mechanical ; 
and you can never turn a mechanic into a creator. 
Hence when critics say that Tennyson was an artist 
before he beame a poet, they imply that he never 
became a poet. For there never was a truer saying 
than the old trite one : Poeta nascitur. He may bury 
his gift, and stifle his creative powers, and become a 
Poietes apoietes ; but his is a birthright that can 
never be bought or sold. 



Cedar Chips One hundred twenty-seven 



OIl|f llttrpnrabti 

There is another great advantage in this reserve 
of foreign travel. Something as yet remains unre- 
vealed. Remember that ennui is the disease of mod- 
ern life; and that ennui is simply the repletion of 
those who have tasted too speedily, or too freely, 
at the banquet of life. Unhappy is the man who 
has parted with all his illusions ; and such is he in 
a most special manner, who has seen all things, 
and tried all, and found all wanting. For the first 
view, the first experience, is the poetry of existence. 
And poetry, like reverence, will not tolerate famil- 
iarity. You won't rave about Alps, or Apennines, 
the second time you see them. You have acquired 
knowledge, and lost a dream. Now, the dream for- 
ever remains for one who has not seen but believed. 
The mystery, the wonder^ the charm, are yet before 
him. He may yet see and be glad. Earth and sea 
hold all their miracles in reserve for him. He can- 
not sit down in middle age, and say : "I have seen 
all things beneath the sun; and lo! all is vanity!" 
No ! he will not say that, so long as the bright suc- 
cession of the world's wonders may yet file before 
him. He has always a reserve ; and sinks even into 
his grave with all the hope and fascination, all the 
glamor and straining eyes of inexperience. 



One hundred twenty-eight Cedar ChipS 



To one living at a distance from railways, the 
whistle of the engine gives a thrill of novelty, and 
a sudden pleasure. There is a romance, and even 
a poetry in railways. At least, to one unaccustomed 
to leave home, a railway journey is a rare enjoy- 
ment. He cannot see the great, smooth engine roll- 
ing into the platform, or behold the faces at the win- 
dows, or take his seat, without a certain excite- 
ment, or nervous thrill, that is utterly unknown to 
the experienced traveller. The comfortable, cush- 
ioned seat, the electric light overhead, the mirrors all 
around him, the new, strange faces, each with its 
secret soul looking out, anxious, hopeful, or per- 
plexed ; the very isolation of his travelling compan- 
ions and the mystery that hangs around their un- 
knownness ; the quiet that settles down on the car- 
riage as it glides out so smoothly from the station ; 
the rapid succession of scenes that move across the 
field of vision — all is novel, all unexperienced, all 
delightful ! He would give the world to know who, 
or what, is that old gentleman who has pulled his 
rug around him and is buried in his papers ; or that 
young, pale fellow, who is so much at home, he 
must be a much travelled man ; or that young girl, 
who is gazing so steadfastly through the window. 
And the real pleasure is, that all is mystery, and 
wonder, and the unknown, even to the end. 



Cedar Chips One hundred twenty-nine 



Twenty-five years ago I thought that a Cunard, 
or White Star liner, outward bound, was the most 
interesting sight on earth. I think so still. The 
silence of its movements, its obedience to the slight- 
est touch, the risks and hazards before it, when it is 
but a speck on the illimitable deep, and the moon- 
light is all about it, or when it is rocked from billow 
to billow, like a cork; but, above all, the strange, 
mysterious faces that look from behind their veils 
at you, and the stranger drama that is being enacted 
there — all conspire to make that floating caraven- 
serai one of those objects of interest and wonder 
that carry with them always the glamor and mys- 
tery of another world. That is, to the inexperi- 
enced. I dare say, that commercial traveller who 
has crossed the Atlantic twenty times, and who 
seems so much at home there upon the sloping deck, 
thinks otherwise. Probably, he is calculating how 
much he will win at poker or euchre ; or what seat 
he shall have at table. The lady, too, who has just 
done Europe, and who looks so tired and blasce, is 
just hoping that the beastly voyage may be soon 
over, that she may plunge once more into the glori- 
ous whirl of New York excitement. But to the un- 
travelled, the inexperienced, all is wonder and mys- 
tery, from the mysterious being up aloft who is the 
master of our destines, to the grimy fireman, who 
comes up from the Inferno, to catch one breath of 
fresh salt air. 



One hundred thirty Cedar ChipS 



Slnragntta 

If the untravelled is wise, he will speak to no 
one but in monosyllables, and preserve his own in- 
cognito and inexperience to the end. Thus, he, too, 
will be a mystery, and somewhat interesting to 
others, who will be dying to penetrate behind his 
mask. And all around will bear the glamor of un- 
knownness to his imagination. It is horrible — that 
disillusion about people, around whom you have 
woven your own webs of fancy. Now, if you accost 
that commercial traveller, you will, you must, re- 
veal the fact that you are crossing the Atlantic for 
the first time ; and down you go several degrees in 
his esteem. Or, if you are happy enough to get ac- 
quainted with that young lady in the canvas chair, 
blue veiled, and with infinite rugs about her, she 
will probably tell vou "she has just done Yurrup, 
and is tired of the whole show." And the airy web 
of fancy is rudely torn asunder. Or, if you should 
come to know the officers, and they, with their usual 
kindness, tell you all about their vessel, and their ex- 
periences, or gossip about the passengers, or show 
you the tremendous mechanism that is the heart- 
throb and life-pulse of the ship, you wall have to 
come down to the standpoint of common-place ; and 
before you step ashore at New York, your nerves 
will have cooled down, and you will regard the ship 
of fancy as a black old hulk, with a hideous brass 
kettle in its centre. 



Cedar Chips One hundred thirty-one 



l^ftxttmt Vint ^tvtrtntt 

There is a great deal more than we are accus- 
tomed to think in this habit of reticence and rever- 
ence. Touch not, taste not, if you would keep fresh 
the divine fancies that spring from a pure imagination, 
excited by pure and inspiring literature. It was the 
irreverent curiosity of our first parents that opened 
their eyes to unutterable things. They touched, 
tasted, and saw. Better for them and their poster- 
ity had they kept the reverence due to the behests of 
the Most High, and with it their unsullied innocence 
and blessed want of knowledge. There was a tra- 
dition of our childhood that the mother bird would 
desert a nest once breathed upon by others. The 
place was profaned and she would haunt it no longer, 
even though the blue or speckled eggs should never 
come to maturity. Even so with the spirit. It re- 
fuses to go back to places once dishallowed by 
knowledge. It prefers to hover over lonely heights, 
and to haunt unpeopled solitudes ; and there to keep 
the virginal freshness of its inexperience unsullied 
by knowledge that opens the eyes of mind and body, 
but blinds the vision of the soul. 



One hundred thirty-two Cedar ChipS 



2II|r Clamor nf t!|r &ra 

But, coming back under the umbrage and gloom 
of great trees from the illimitable expanses of sea 
and sky. I ask myself why I experience a sudden 
narrowing and contraction of spirit, although my 
mind is as free and untrammelled as before. And 
why do the people, sick of their prison houses and 
the narrow limitations of daily life, seek for fresh- 
ness down there as close to the sea as they can go? 
For they will not look at the sea from afar, nor 
from safe vantage grounds, but they creep down and 
sit on rocks that overhang the tremendous depths; 
and imperil their lives by going lower and lower 
still, until their feet are washed by the incoming 
irresistible tides. What do they want? What do 
they seek? It is not pure air alone. That they can 
have on mountain summits. Yet they never go to 
the mountains. But the most unpoetic, unromantic, 
prosaic people will seek the seashore, and remain 
there the whole day long, and tear themselves away 
from it with difficulty, and even when it is only a 
memory and a dream, will speak of it the whole 
winter long, and bear the worries and work of the 
year in the hope that they shall seek and see the 
sands and waves and the far horizon again. 



Cedar Chips One hundred thirty-three 



I cannot explain it, except by the theory of our 
universal and insatiable craving after the un- 
bounded, the Infinite. You imprison the soul, when 
you limit its aspirations. It must be in touch with 
the universe. It is the one thing on earth, the only 
thing, that cannot make its home here. All things 
else are content to do their little work, perform 
their little part, and die. Winds arise and blow, and 
pass away ; seas come and go. and scatter themselves 
on the sands ; leaves bud and develop, and fall ; ani- 
mals are born, pass on to maturity, and return to 
the inorganic state. Man alone looks out and be- 
yond this planet. Here he hath no lasting dwelling- 
place. His soul is with the stars. And therefore 
it chafes at its imprisonment in the body ; and even 
the accidental environments of place and scenery 
afifect this strange, homeless exile, that is forever 
pining after its own country. How sweetly the 
Church interprets this feeling in the beautiful Bene- 
diction Hymn : 

Qui vitam sine termino 
is^obis donet in patria. 

And that is the vision we look for when we strain 
our eyes across the sunlit sea, and dream of things 
beyond the visible horizon, but not beyond the hori- 
zon of our hopes. 



Iftcm **Par^rga 



Cedar Chips One hundred thirty-seven 



"I would ask thee three questions," said the 
Prince. "And first : when is man greatest ?" 

''When he laughs amid his tears ; when he suf- 
fers, and is silent ; when he labours, although he 
foresees he never shall be paid," answered the man. 

"Where is woman greatest?" asked the Prince. 

"By the cradle of her child, by the couch of the 
dying, at the feet of God," said the man. 

"When is God greatest?" asked the Prince. 

"There are no degrees in God," said the man de- 
voutly. "He is always greatest and best." 

"Come!" said the Prince to his companion; "I 
have found him whom I sought." 



One hundred thirty-eight Q^^^^ ^J^Jpg 



I know that some people decry sentimentality, — 
good, pious people, — on the score of religion; fash- 
ionable people because it is emotional ; and emotion 
is the one unforgivable sin. The former forget that 
shortest, but sweetest text in all Holy Writ : And 
Jesus 7t'cpt.' The latter might know that it is this 
very emotionalism that marks them off from the 
animal creation, inasmuch as it is neither instinct 
nor passion, nor sensuous nor base, but only some 
higher element, consecrated by a memory tenacious 
of what is tender and reverent, and softened down 
by that sense of dependence or protection that is the 
highest bond of social life. Oh, yes! Thank God 
for our poets ; and thanks, O shade of Tennyson, for 
that line, no matter how sad it may be : 

"The tender grace of a day that is dead 
Shall never come back to me." 



Oedar Chios ^°® hundred thirty-nine 



CHantraatfi of ffiift 

Nothing surprises me more than the contrasts 
of life. I notice that sometimes a little circumstance 
that passes unheeded and ineffectual in every-day 
life, becomes suddenly magnified in a certain junc- 
ture of accidents into an event of vast importance. 
And the most trivial offence against morality, which 
perhaps for generations has passed unheeded, sud- 
renly develops into a crime, which receives exem- 
plary but disproportionate punishment. But these 
singular contrasts are in no wise so manifested as in 
the estimate that is placed by men on human life. 
Here in the wards of a hospital is a little child 
whose life is imperilled in the grip of some dire 
disease. Lights are lowered ; footfalls are made 
inaudible by slippers of felt ; night and day, a skilled 
and trained nurse never leaves that bedside ; grave 
doctors come in three or four times a day, examine 
with knitted brows the diaries or noctaries of the 
nurses — pulsations, temperature, food, liquids, the 
action of medicines ; develop furious tempers if 
there is the slightest appearance of neglect ; anx- 
iously consult with one another ; open heavy tomes 
for new lights ; go away perturbed ; return with 
deeper furrows on their foreheads ; and all this 
science and skill and zeal — to save that little thread 
of life that vibrates in that tiny child. 



One hundred forty Cedar Chips 



And if death intervenes doctors and nurses feel 
that they are defeated and shamed. They pass by 
that little waxen figure with averted eyes and down- 
cast heads. Death is the victor, and he waves his 
black flag in derision above their heads. There was 
life, — life in its most humble and tiniest form, and 
they have failed to save it. Yet those same doctors 
will pass from the bedside of that child where they 
fought such a desperate battle, and, taking up the 
morning newspaper in the hospital surgery, read 
with perfect composure and little interest of twenty 
thousand lives lost in a tidal wave in Japan, or a 
thousand lives lost in a South American earthquake, 
or a regiment or two blown to atoms suddenly by 
a concealed mine in some mad human conflict. How 
do you explain it? Professional honour? No. 
That won't do. Honour is not at stake. They 
have done all that men can do. Tenderness for 
that child ? No, alas ! The cases are too common ; 
and tenderness vanishes through familiarity. And 
they don't allude to honour ; and they don't assume 
a tenderness they are far from feeling. No! It is 
life! life! It is their duty, their vocation, to save 
life, no matter how mutilated and miserable it shall 
be. And they have failed. 



Cedar Chips One hundred forty-one 



Here is a poor young girl who sat out 
during the warm days in the sunshine, eagerly 
grasping every sunbeam to extract from it a life- 
elixir. A few years ago, conscious of her great 
beauty, she almost spurned the flags of the village 
street, as she walked with springing step in all her 
Sunday finery, and knew that the eyes of many hun- 
gered after her. Then her own home became too 
small for her ambition. America alone was large 
enough for her desires. She went away, became a 
unit, an insignificant unit amongst millions, whose 
eyes, dazzled with the glare of gold, had no sight 
for her beauty. Then came sickness, sadness, a 
craving for the old home, where she could at least 
die in peace, with friendly faces around her. She sat 
out during these few weeks, patient and sorrowful, 
her physical beauty etherealised by the dread dis- 
ease that was slowly eating away her life. She has 
disappeared. It is easy to imagine the rest. The 
eternal hacking cough, the night-sweats, the ever- 
growing weakness, the depression, the despair — the 
calling on God at the midnight hour to plunge her 
into the blessed forgetfulness of a dreamless sleep! 



One hundred forty-two Cedar ChipS 



And yet, if one in mercy, whispers even the name 
of death as the one hope-giver, she shudders, looks 
frightened, and weeps. She cries all night long for 
unconsciousness, for sleep. But the unconscious- 
ness of death is an unspeakable terror. Why this 
inconsistency ? Is not death a blessed thing, — God's 
greatest and most beautiful angel, who comes to us 
so softly, and so gently unweaves the bands of flesh, 
and touches so quietly that wound that the very 
touch is an anaesthetic ; and gradually weakens and 
uncoils the springs of existence, so that when at last 
he touches the last frail thread., it snaps without pain, 
and the soul sinks into a langour that is a sweet pre- 
lude to the eternal rest? Why do men fear it? Is 
it the inertia of life that will not bear transmission? 
Or the habit of life that will not bear being broken? 
Or the dread of 

" The undiscovered country, from whose bourn 
No traveller returns " ? 

Or a foolish fear, as of children who see spectres 
everywhere, and will not walk on unknown land, 
lest unseen terrors should leap forth to paralyse or 
appal ? 



Cedar Chips One hundred forly-three 



(Ktff Mm Witli ttfp ^at 

I am not at all sure but that manual training 
should go hand in hand with, and even precede, 
mental training. Very often the mind, slower in its 
development than the body, can afford to wait. And, 
besides, manual training is mental training, inas- 
much as it develops powers of observation, accuracy 
of thinking, patience in watching details, and the 
labour of perseverance. But, apart from that, no 
mental training is a compensation for feeble mus- 
cles, weak nerves, myopia, and the host of other 
evils that are inseparable from purely sedentary 
lives ; and no mental acquirement or intellectual 
success is compensation for that growing contempt 
for honest manual labor which is becoming one of 
the most vicious and unpleasant symptoms of our 
advanced civilization. "Back to the land !" is the 
cry of all economists of the present day ; and "Back 
to manual work!" may also be the warcry of those 
who are painfully conscious that our advanced civil- 
ization is more or less that of a race in its decrepi- 
tude, and on the downgrade towards extinction. At 
least, it seems very certain to some minds that it is 
the "man with the hoe," and not the man with the 
pen, we need mostly in these times. 



One hundred forty.four Q^^^^ Q^^^^ 



MUmss 

Hence I cannot help feeling a certain contempt 
or loathing when I behold young men, just budding 
into the twenties, calmly putting the pillows of old 
age under their elbows, and settling down to a long 
life of most ignoble inactivity. It is not alone the 
Sybaritic baseness and selfishness of the thing that 
repels, but the very horror at the incongruity of 
studied idleness and uselessness amidst the general 
activities of Nature. Clearly these are mere para- 
sites of Nature, and the word has an ill signification. 
It means not only idleness and uselessness, but 
theft, disregard for others' rights, preying on the 
industries of others, eating bread that is not right- 
eously earned. It may be a safe life and a secure 
one, where none of the lower evils are encountered, 
and there is always a kind of dulcet monotone of un- 
disturbed serenity. But if great trials are avoided, 
great deeds also remain undone, and, in hugging a 
miserable sense of security, the possibility of noble- 
ness is utterly lost. 



Cedar Chips 0°« hundred forty-five 



^ams (iirrttt ^bral 

Every man should have a great ideal in life — 
some high point in character or action to be aimed 
at, even though it be never attained. No man is 
absolute arbiter of his fate, or parcellor of his des- 
tiny. Will-power counts for much, but only when 
conscience is laid aside. "If you want to make your 
way in the world," says a witty French writer, "you 
must plough through humanity like a cannon-ball, 
or you must glide through it like a pestilence." Had 
he his countrymen Napoleon and Voltaire before 
his mind, when he penned these words? But "mak- 
ing one's way in the world" is not the attainment of 
the high ideal of which I speak. It is rather a low 
ideal, the poor ambition of fox or beaver, or their 
human types in commerce or the professions. It is 
an animal instinct. It marks a man as belonging to 
a degenerate type. It is not the symbol or phrase 
that designates the higher call to the higher issues 
towards which humanity is bound to tend. 



One hundred forty-six Cedar ChipS 



Better to have written on our tombs : "Labo- 
ravi," or "Passus sum," than "Felicissimus fui." I 
have seen two faces quite latel}' on whose foreheads 
such inscriptions had been already chiselled. One 
was the face of a gentlewoman, grown old in peace 
and prosperity, on whom the world had always 
smiled. Peace had been her portion, and old age 
was not infirmity, but the crown and consummation 
of the unbroken felicities that had been her lot in 
life. One could be thankful, but one could not wor- 
ship there. The other had been sculptured by life- 
long sorrow, — perpetual sickness, loss of material 
resources, falling away of friends, deception where 
honour had been expected, derision for no fault but 
for having borne the whips of Fate. It was one of 
those faces, which externally calm, are ever ready 
to break their surface serenity by the trembling of 
a lip or the gathering and falling of a silent tear. 
One might well worship here. We are in the sanc- 
tuary of sorrow. 



Cedar Chios ^°* hundred forty-seven 



An Smparttal but InrraHonablp Selling 

It is hard to argue against the fear of Death, 
especially with the young. So many passed by, and 
they chosen ! So many old and forlorn creatures 
for whom life had no pleasure, because no hope, 
trembling on the verge, and yet apparently forgotten 
by the angel Death ! So many worthless creatures, 
whose lives do not contain a single utility, — nay, 
whose very existence seemed detrimental to every 
cause and individual with whom they came in con- 
tact ; and lo ! Death passes them by, and leaves the 
barren fig-trees untouched ; and lays his heavy hand 
on some life, that was bourgeoning out in all fair 
promises of vast utility to itself and mankind. So 
argues a second patient of mine, a young man, 
stricken with that dread disease, cancer. He is not 
impatient nor disconsolate. He is resigned. But he 
cannot understand. He is perplexed by the mystery 
of things. He has had his sentence of death duly 
passed on him ; and the numbered hours are fleeting 
swiftly by. But he is young. He clings to hope. 
The local doctor is on his holidays. He has a chance 
now. Perhaps some other may speak a word of 
hope. He summons him by telegram. He presents 
the following diagnosis of his formidable disease. 



One hundred forty-eight Cedar ChipS 



A pprannal Siagnoflta 

"Seven months ago, in South Africa, I under- 
went an operation for epithelioma of the antrum, 
necessitating the excision of the left superior max- 
illa ; and, on account of exopthalmus, the left eye 
had to be enucleated. Since then my voice has been 
badly impaired; and so I wrote down these partic- 
ulars, my artificial palate not working properly of 
late. A few months after the operation, anaesthesia 
extended along the temple and forehead on the left 
side. It has now crossed the middle line, and in- 
volves the whole forehead and scalp. I have been 
laid up for five days with a swollen eye-socket. It 
is with respect to the latter that I wish to consult 
you. Since the operation, the socket has been in a 
state of inflammation, with a profuse whitish dis- 
charge. It is now greatly swollen. The temple on 
the same side is also much swollen. The pain is 
not very great, but there is a feeling of uneasiness 
and oppression. The wound cavity left by the oper- 
ation is looking well, and there is no evidence of re- 
currence in that quarter. I cannot account for the 
accentuation of the anaesthesia, for its extension, 
and for the aggravated state of the eye-socket. I 
would like you to tackle the eye-socket particularly ; 
that region is very anaesthetic, and is affecting my 
head greatly. I may mention there is still some 
granulated tissue and constant extravasation of 
blood behind the eye-socket or at the floor of the 
orbit, as I pay constant attention to it, and know 
how it is getting on." 



Cedar Chips One hundred forty-nine 



I doubt if there were on this planet a more sur- 
prised man than that doctor, when he read this diag- 
nosis. The science of medicine is a secret science. 
Very wisely, its professors have wrapped up all its 
principles and discoveries in an occult and dead 
language. Its prescriptions are written in a kind of 
luminous shorthand, of which only some letters are 
of Roman type, the rest being cabalistic signs. It 
is a kind of calyptic cypher of which only one man 
holds the key. It is pitiful, but instructive to see 
how an ordinary layman turns over the mysterious 
paper in his hand, and stares in blank ignorance at 
it ; and to witness his surprise when the chemist 
glances over it, and proceeds to interpret it in act. 
Then all medical books are written in great pon- 
derous symbols of sesquipedalian Greek, as if the 
writers kept Liddell and Scott always on their desks, 
and picked out the longest and hardest words. And 
then — watch the contemptuous and angry stare with 
which any layman, or even neophyte, is crushed who 
dares to touch even the fringe of medical mystery. 
It is a kind of sacrilegious invasion into a region 
where only the initiated are admitted ; and happy is 
the unhappy wight who is let off easily with the 
warning: "You had better leave these things alone, 
young man !" 



One hundred fifty (^g^jar ChipS 



It is the same with the Science of law. Here the 
adage holds, "The man who is his own lawyer has a 
fool for a client." And we know how sternly is the 
prescription enforced in the courts of justice, that 
no man can be heard unless through the lips of a 
lawyer. You may be as learned as Scaliger, and 
have all the legal lore of Chitty and Bacon and Coke 
at your fingers' ends ; but if you presume to in- 
fringe upon the hereditary rights of the legal pro- 
fession, you may be assumed to have sacrificed your 
best interests. "By whom are you represented, sir?" 
is the dire question. "By myself!" "Oh!" And 
your case is lost, that is, if you are permitted to 
speak at all ; for, in certain courts, you cannot plead 
except through the instrumentality of a lawyer. Is 
this right.'' That is not the question. We are but 
stating facts — that a cordon is drawn around the 
learned professions by rule and statute, by prescrip- 
tion and tradition ; and all who are not initiated into 
the mysteries, who have not eaten dinners and sawed 
bones, are rigidly excluded. Right or wrong this 
exclusiveness undoubtedly surrounds the professions 
with a certain atmosphere of reverence which mate- 
rially helps to keep sacred the inner workings, which 
would soon be profaned by exposure. 



Cedar Chips One hundred fifty-one 



Strange to say, it is only theological science that 
has no such bounds and ramparts as these. It is a 
commonage where every one may stray at his own 
sweet will. It has been invaded, overrun by every 
class and every individual from the beginning of 
Christianity until now. Under the Jewish dispensa- 
tion, it was kept apart and sacred from the multi- 
tude, — hedged in by every kind of legislation, prim- 
itive and prohibitive. No man dared touch the Holy 
Mountain ; no one but the High Priest was privileged 
to enter the Holy of Holies. One tribe was set 
apart for the priesthood. All teaching and all legis- 
lation came from the lips of a consecrated priest- 
hood. Still more exclusive and dominant were, and 
are, the sacred hierarchies of the Eastern religions. 
The Lamas and Brahmins allow no lay-interference 
with their privileges. Even kings and emperors 
must keep aloof. Their lamaseries and monasteries 
are sacred ground, where no one dare trespass with- 
out permission. Their traditional teachings are such 
that no man dares contravene or challenge. But no 
sooner was Christianity established than a Simon 
Magus tried to penetrate and purchase its mysteri- 
ous powers ; and from the first, laymen, from the 
Emperor down to the prefect, sought to usurp the 
sacred rights of the Christian priesthood, and mould 
the dogmas of the Christian faith to suit political 
exigencies or private whims. 



One hundred fifty-lwo Cedar ChipS 



Ollrp (Hrrat Slrhrllton 

Then came the great rebellion, with its cardinal 
principle that theology was no science ; that religion 
had no mysteries ; and that every man had a perfect 
right to frame his own dogma according to the di- 
rection of private interpretation. And whilst all 
other sciences became more exact in their guiding 
laws, and sought to render more rigid every day 
the boundaries of professional exclusiveness ; whilst 
great generalisations broke up into special depart- 
ments, and each department surrounded itself by 
ahattis after abattis of rules and ceremonies, the 
vast domain of theology was broken into by every 
scarilegious and impious speculator, and all its mys- 
teries were profaned by hands that held them up 
to the public gaze either as commonplace truths that 
no man could deny, or fraudulent presumptions that 
no man could accept. And to-day^ scientific men of 
every rank and grade, biologists, geologists, astron- 
omers, legislators in every shape, literary men 
through the press, judges on the bench, and even 
the "man in the street" crowd through the broken 
defences and tumbled barricades to plough and sow, 
and reap a sorry harvest where once was the wheat 
that made the Bread of Life, and the wine that ger- 
minated virgins. 



Cedar Chips One hundred fifty-three 



An KttHrifntifir ^tpwctmt 

Apart from the desecration and the unreasoning 
fury and folly of all this, it is a distinct departure 
from the secret and inviolable laws that direct the 
operations of evolution in Nature and Society. For 
we know that the lower the organism, the more sim- 
ple are its organs and operations. In certain zo5- 
phytes, each part is capable of every function. As 
we advance higher in the scale, the functional ener- 
gies, becoming more extended, demand new organs 
for their operation ; until we reach the higher mam- 
mals, where every function has its own specific or- 
gan, localized and developed. The same tendency 
exists in the body politic, where all the energies are 
again specifically located, and, though obedient to 
and progressing from a common centre, are concen- 
trated in some council, or society, or department, 
whose operations, if controlled from a centre, are 
yet specifically distinct, and more or less independ- 
ent. In the science of theology alone, there is, on 
the part of the masses, an idea that, dissolved as a 
science, it had better be allowed to drift back to 
primitive elements — which are the thoughts of indi- 
viduals — for dogmata, and the vagaries of human 
passion for moral and ethical principle. 



One hundred fifty-four Cedar Chips 



And yet theology is a science, a great science, 
a complicated science; a science to the upbuilding of 
which were devoted the energies of the greatest in- 
tellects that have become incarnated on this planet. 
A world of iconoclasts, such as that in which we 
live, may pass by with unbowed heads the statues 
of St. Augustine and St. Thomas ; and may affect 
never to have seen the shrines where saints and 
scholars, like Ambrose and Bernard, are niched for 
ever. But they cannot break them. And so long as 
the printing-press shall last, there shall remain the 
record of their studies in the greatest of human sci- 
ences, and the results of their researches into the 
recesses of mysteries, which are to-day, as yesterday, 
as closed secrets to the eyes of science as they were 
when men believed that the heavens were domed 
above the earth as the centre and pivot of space. It 
is pitiful to see the easy and flippant way in which 
modern sciolists dispense with the consideration of 
questions that agonized the minds of Tertullian and 
Augustine. 



Cedar Chips One hundred fifty-five 



'^0 jiptrrg in i^riitcinr 

Yes, my good doctor was much surprised. He 
seemed not able to take his eye from that page where 
the dying boy had recorded the dread symptoms of 
the disease that was slowly eating away his life. 
He whistled softly to himself, looked curiously at 
the patient, whispered the mysterious words, "epi- 
thelioma," "enucleated," "antrum," "maxilla," and 
finally asked : 

"You have been a medical student?" 

"No!" was the faint, muffled whisper that came 
from the diseased throat. "I am a journalist!" 

"Oh!" 

"But," the doctor said, after a pause, "no one 
but a medical expert could have written this?" 

"I made a study of the disease when I knew I 
was affected," was the reply. 

"Rather a foolish thing," said the doctor, main- 
taining the professional exclusiveness. 

"Not at all," was the reply. "There is no mys- 
tery about it." 

The doctor shook his head. This was rank 
heresy to his mind. He turned to me. 



One hundred fifty-six Cedar Chips 



"Strange," he whispered, although the hideous 
malady had destroyed the boy's hearing, "how things 
work. The blow falls here and there ; and there 
appears to be no rule, no uniformity, no consist- 
ency." 

I nodded acquiescence. 

"If any one were to ask why this boy, clever, 
accomplished, enterprising, should have been struck 
down on the very threshold of a brilliant career, 
whilst hundreds of mere hinds and louts go free, 
where would be the answer?" 

The good doctor never saw that he was passing 
ultra crepidam. He who would resent, who did re- 
sent, the trespass of that poor boy upon the sacred 
precincts of medical science^, was now unconsciously 
usurping the office of theologian. For medical sci- 
ence has only to deal with facts, I presume, — physio- 
logical facts, pathological facts, materia medica, etc., 
etc. What has a doctor to do with philosophy, — 
with motives, reasons, causes of things? Let him 
keep to his scalpel and his stethoscope ! But no ! 
Every one must have his say about these transcen- 
dent mysteries that have ever stupified and puzzled 
the human mind, as if they were market-merchan- 
dise, to be turned over, and pulled asunder, and ex- 
amined and valued by every hind, or huckster, or 
vivandicre, who wants a cheap bargain. Well, after 
all, it argues the existence of something more than 
a beaver or squirrel faculty in man, and, as such, 
is worthy of some esteem. I thought this, but did 
not say it to my good doctor. Then I took the 
thought home with me. It was my property. 



Cedar Chios ^°* hundred fifty-seven 



An Autumnal ©gjip 

My first autumnal type has plunged suddenly 
downwards from affluence to poverty, and has kept 
his equanimity unruffled. He had been in the en- 
joyment of some thousands a year; had had a sub- 
urban villa so filled with all sorts of art-treasures 
that one could scarcely move around his rooms. 
The walls were so lined with etchings and engrav- 
ings, statuettes and pictures, bronze busts and 
plaques, that scarcely one square inch of paper was 
visible. Out of doors his gardens stretched up in 
stately terraces, one rivalling the other in splen- 
dour, until the whole beautiful vista terminated in 
a pavilion, again filled with all kinds of costly and 
artistic things gathered from repositories in the great 
cities of the world. Here, from time to time, that 
is very often, he brought together numerous friends 
from city and town, regaled them with every luxury, 
amused them with every kind of entertainment, 
until the place became a little Paradise above the 
sea, which lent to the scene its own enchantment. 
Then came the crash. The whole thing vanished 
like a dream. It was many years after that when I 
visited the place again. I had seen it in the very 
zenith of its glory, and had taken away and stored 
up in the maps of memory a beautiful picture of the 
place, of its surroundings, of its generous and kindly 
master. I passed by in the dusk of the evening. The 
high wall that shielded from vulgar observation all 
this loveliness was broken down. I went in. The 
magnificent pavilion was a mass of ruin ; its perfect 
flower-beds were overgrown with nettles. The 
splendid urns that capped the pedestals were slimy 
and broken. It was a picture of ruin and desola- 
tion. 



One hundred fifty-eight Q^^^^ (^^3 



Soon after I met the former master of this 
ruined paradise. Although past his seventieth year, 
he was still in all his autumnal splendour. Fate and 
ill-fortune had not touched him. The same bright- 
ness, the same cheerfulness, the same bonhomie, the 
same optimism that had made him the centre of his 
circle some years before, had not abandoned him in 
adversity and penury. "I am a happier man to-day," 
he said, "than when I had thousands to spend. I 
have a room during the summer down near the sea, 
and two rooms here in the city for the winter, and a 
cool hundred a year. I have no responsibility now. 
I needn't ask John, Dick, or Harry to dine, and to 
tell you the truth," he added, with a smile, "I'm not 
likely to be asked myself." 

"What?" I cried. "You, who entertained like 
a prince — do you mean to tell me that you are never 
challenged by any of your former friends to a paltry 
dinner?" 

"Never!" he said frankly. "And what is more, 
they cut me here in this very street!" 

"The hounds!" I couldn't help saying. "Do 

you mean to say that not even has an open 

house for you?" 

He shook his head, but always smiling. 

"He doesn't see me when we pass here. Or 
rather he does, and goes to the other side of the 
street." 



Cedar Chips One hundred fifty-nine 



"Why, the last time I saw him," I cried, " 'twas 
in the Pavilion. He had a glass (and a good long, 
tall one it was) of champagne in his hand, and he 
was diving into a lobster salad as hard as he could. 
I remember I had to jump his long spider legs when 
I was coming away." 

"My dear fellow," he said, "don't you know 'tis 
all human nature? When I had all these friends at 
the Pavilion, feeding them and entertaining them, I 
was pleasing myself. There is one phase of human 
nature. When they choose to cut me, there is an- 
other. Did I expect anything else? Certainly not. 
I know the world too well. And what difference 
does it make? I can now pass along here without 
bothering about anyone. I can stop and look at the 
shop windows without being molested. I know 
no one, and no one knows me. Tant mieux! 
Hallo Jiff! Jiff! Jiff!" 

He took a boatswain's whistle from his vest 
pocket and looked anxiously around. Far away, a 
little black, woolly terrier was dodging tram-cars, 
side-cars, and passengers. When she heard the 
well-known whistle she scampered over to her mas- 
ter's feet. 

"Good day," he said ; "I am glad to see you for 
old times' sake." 

"Good day," I replied ; "I am glad to have seen 
the greatest Irish philosopher after Berkeley." 



One hundred sixty Cedar ChipS 



It is a gusty, windy, autumnal day. The wild 
west wind has burst his bonds and is thundering up 
from the horizon, driving huge black clouds before 
him, like the disorganized phalanxes of a conquered 
army. And he has caught in his fierce embraces the 
forest trees, and shaken them, and clashed them to- 
gether, till the whole sky is mottled with flying 
leaves, spinning in the whirlwind ; and the ground 
is growing thick with the red refuse of the dying 
year. And, quite appropriately, another autumnal 
type of character crosses my path. He is grizzled 
and gray before his time ; and some sharper chisel 
than the years has cut channels in his cheeks, and 
sunk the orbits of eyes that smoulder in repose, but 
gleam with a terrible light when you touch one sub- 
ject. And how can you avoid it. when it embraces 
everything of interest, — that is, men and women — 
the world — the race — humanity Tolerant enough, 
polite, even charitable in a large measure, he be- 
comes absolutely ferocious when you turn the con- 
versation on the Zeit-Geist. The fact is, he com- 
menced badly, — with a large, childlike, hopeful, 
trusting faith in human nature, which has now 
changed into a fanatical hatred. I can quite under- 
stand it, although he has never explained. 



Cedar Chips One hundred sJxly-one 



Sarlg SJuiratton 

I see him coming forth from a home where he 
was surrounded with all that was sweet and beauti- 
ful and sacred, where he never leaned against any- 
thing harder than a pillow, and the flutter of a rose- 
leaf was not allowed to ruffle his sleep. He was 
taught — O stiilti et caeci corde! — that the whole 
world was like this! — that truth, honour, purity, 
sweetness, modesty, benevolence, were to be his 
guardian angels through life ; and that, above all, 
he should smile on the world to get back smiles in 
return. It was a long story, the story of his dis- 
illusion, for he clung with despairing tenacity to 
his childhood's principles, until^ one by one, they 
came to be disproved, and the last shred of their 
protection was torn away, leaving him naked to his 
enemies. What was worse, he found, in all authors 
who had become sacred to him by reason of their 
lofty standing in literature or from early associa- 
tions, that the same principles, endeared to him by 
early teaching, were carefully inculcated until they 
had become a faith, a religion, interwoven into his 
life. 



One hundred sixty-two Cedar ChipS 



jIBtalUuBian 

The progress of the world, the perfectibility of 
man, the advance of the race from civilization to a 
yet higher civilization, the elimination of all phys- 
ical evil and all moral taint, until the apex was 
reached, where man should stand forth the immortal 
realization of an idea, — all these phrases and sen- 
tences had become the symbols and embodiment of 
the theories that had touched the enthusiasm of his 
youth, and inspired the more sober opinions of mid- 
dle age. Alas! slowly and painfully he awoke to 
the knowledge of human imperfection, deepening, as 
the years advanced, into a knowledge of human ig- 
norance and iniquity, and culminating in the autumn- 
rial years into a recognition or belief in almost uni- 
versal depravity. He was not saddened, but mad- 
dened, by the revelation. Even though it had slowly 
grown into a conviction, it carried with it the shock, 
the surprise of a sudden unveiling of deeps too 
terrible to be contemplated or measured. Like some 
monomania that is suddenly engendered by brain 
fever, or that grows out of painful experience, his 
mind was ever revolving around it ; and his conver- 
sation, no matter from what distant pole it started, 
invariably turned back to the one topic on which 
the wheels of thought moved as on a pivot. 



Cedar Chips One hundred sixty-three 



"I can pardon a good deal," he would say, "but 
I cannot condone your crime in educating children 
as you do. You teach them that it is dishonourable 
to lie or steal ; you teach them to be merciful and 
kind and self-effacing; you teach them an altruism 
which is divine rather than human. And you teach 
all this on the understanding that the world will give 
back as it receives, and mirror the riant and bland 
expressions of ingenuous youth. You take that 
child from school, and the first lesson the world 
teaches him is, that all the wheels of life and society 
are moved by lying and hypocrisy. You place that 
boy behind a counter where, if he lies not, he is in- 
stantly dismissed. He is taught, and not only 
taught, but ordered, to put a price on his goods and 
merchandise not according to market values, or 
current charges, or a scale of legitimate profit, but 
according to the appearance of his customers. You 
put him in a fair or market. He instantly knows 
that he must lie foully for self -protection, for every 
man amongst these thousands has come hither to 
swindle or to cheat. You give him a profession. 
He lies with his fingers on his patient's pulse. And 
he will save the most consummate scoundrel from 
the gallows, and drive the most innocent beneath it. 
for that bribe called a fee." 



One hundred sixty-four Cedar OhlDS 



3«Btirp SliniJ 

"Look at your Courts of Justice. Every police- 
man knows that to gain the good-will of his officer, 
he must swear up to the mark. Every Crown Prose- 
cutor feels that he is not there to discriminate the 
guilty from the innocent ; but to put the halter 
around the neck of that trembling wretch in the 
dock. The quarry has to be run to ground, and 
he has to do it. That is all ! His professional rep- 
utation will sufifer if that wretch escapes. Tears of 
wife or children, or thier unutterable delight ; de- 
spair of devils, or ecstasy of angels, such as will al- 
ternate in these human hearts contingently upon the 
one word uttered by yonder bland foreman, — these 
have nothing to do with the matter. He wants that 
one word, Guilty! otherwise that venison pasty 
will be tasteless, and that champagne will be flat as 
ditchwater. And all the time Justice stands blind- 
folded with her scales in her hands. Why should 
the bandage fall or be removed ? Will not her paid 
advocates lead her aright, and drop that heavy 
sword into the scales against the condemned with 
a solemn and conscientious J'ae Victisf 



Cedar Chips One hundred sixty- five 



And your statesmen! Here is the sublime ''He 
has lied boldly," said Talleyrand. "There's the 
making of a mighty statesman in him." "Diplo- 
macy," "statecraft," "political foresight," "civic 
wisdom," etc., etc., what an accommodating lan- 
guage ! How it lends itself to euphemisms ! And 
how beautifully men gather up the skirts of easy 
words and wrap them around bald and naked ugli- 
ness, as the clothes of the world hide and dissemble 
all the ugliness of deformed humanity ! "But," 
he cried, with a fillip of his finger, "a truce to all 
that! I don't heed it! Let the world damn itself 
in its own fashion. I'm not going to play the part 
of the faithful Abdiel. But." he cried with bitter 
emphasis, "if I had the education of children in my 
hands, I would have a Fagin-school with several 
Artful Dodgers in every parish to teach the young 
idea how to adapt itself to the larger and more intri- 
cate systems of prevarication and swindling that 
are current in the wide world of men. And I would 
teach them to steel their hearts against every human 
feeling; and smile as their seniors smile when they 
are practicing the arts of hypocrisy and deceit." I 
shuddered at this tirade against the species. He 
went away with his head down and a frown on his 
fine features. 



One hundred sixty-six Cedar ChipS 



Oltrrlft anil (EumuU 

The next evening, I thought, I should not let 
even one of such glorious October sunsets escape 
me. Fading and evanescent — as all beautiful things 
— indeed, as all things are (but somehow the beau- 
tiful seems more frail than the sombre and the 
dreadful, probably because we wish it to remain), — 
yet, there is no reason why we, too, frail and evan- 
escent beings, should not take from them such pleas- 
ures as they afford us. And surely, if there be a 
harmless gratification, it must be that which arises 
from the contemplation of such sublimities as the 
mighty Artist and Architect of the Universe pre- 
pares for his wondering, but ungrateful children. 
This evening, as if with the touch of a magician's 
wand, all the sombre splendours of last night had 
vanished; but there was quite enough of water- 
vapour to catch and reflect the beauty of the dying 
sun. Instead of vast purple and black cumuli, rest- 
ing like some mountain of desolation and grandeur 
on the rim of the horizon, long strata of cirrhous 
clouds stretched from north to south in parallel lines. 
The eastern horrizon was crowded with pink cloud- 
lets, darkening to deep purple on the sky line, and 
in the zenith, the faint and feathery shadows were 
crimsoned, and then gently vanished, as the sun fell 
from his orbit into the burning and glowing west. 



Cedar Chios ^°® hundred sixty-seven 



An lEwftiing S'tar 

But all the other cirrhous flakes of cloudlets were 
masses of burning gold resting on foundations of 
grey vapour, which, in turn, as the departing rays 
of the dying sun struck them, were transmuted into 
red and yellow nuggets of molten metal, with an 
occasional break through the green sky, as of an 
alloy to test their value. I had to shade my eyes 
from their blinding splendours, until, with involu- 
tion after involution, the glowing masses melted 
into each other, or dropped their golden radiances 
from cloud to cloud as the sun descended. It was as 
if some potent stage-manager or stage-painter was 
flinging his majestic colours broadcast over the vast 
curtain of the heavens, until, his palette run dry 
and exhausted, the splendours faded away, so si- 
lently, so gradually, with so much tenderness and 
pathos, that I could only think of the farewell kiss 
of a dying child, or the gradual fading away of those 
spirit- faces that artists have drawn on canvas, but 
never seen in the flesh. Then out came one star, 
dancing and caracoling in the broad heavens that he 
had now to himself. "Pah!" I cried, for the sor- 
row of the thing had crept into my heart, "it is like 
a ballet dancer on the altar of a deserted cathedral !" 



One hundred sixty-eight Cedar ChipS 



"Say rather a herald of eternity!" said a voice, 
and a soft hand rested on my arm. I did not shake 
it off. I did not shake it off, because it was my 
Poet, my dreamer of dreams, my Alter Ego — the 
being with whom alone I can freely converse, and 
open out my mind with the certainty of being un- 
derstood and believed. With him alone I am at 
ease, for to him alone am I intelligible. When I 
converse with other men I feel that I am speaking 
to statues, which stare irresponsively at me. When 
I speak with him I know I am addressing a soul. 
With other men I speak about human topics : — 
their politics, their commerce, their wars, their food, 
their dress. With him I speak of higher subjects, 
— the soul, eternity, the course of history, the trend 
of human events ; Nature, — the eternal Spring, 
earth with its thousand aspects, the Heavens with 
their dark secrets, Life, and the shadow that waits 
for us all with the keys. If ever I touch on merely 
human things, a cloud of disappointment and vexa- 
tion crosses his fine features. He is eloquently 
silent, and runs his fingers through tangled and un- 
combed locks, with just now the winter blossoms 
beginning to gleam through their gold. When I 
speak of higher things, his face glows. The foun- 
tains of the great deep are broken up. 



Cedar Chips One hundred saty-nine 



An A)iolagg for Angrr 

"What are those tears for?" he said, for my 
eyes were red with the sorrow of the sunset, — type 
of all ephemeral and vanishing things. 

"For the sorrow of the world/' I said, "and its 
sad destinies ; for the perishing of all that is most 
fair, and the permanence of all that is foul and sor- 
did. For the earth, which is but a cradle of suffer- 
ing; and for man, who weeps when he is born." 

"But you were more than this," he replied. 
"You were angry, and you used a scornful expres- 
sion. Now, that is an evil mood towards Nature or 
towards man." 

"Angry?" I cried. "Yes! I was. Who could 
help being angry in face of such deceitful and fad- 
ing splendours? And then, as if to mock me, out 
comes that flippant and foolish star, dancing on the 
floor of the firmament, and flapping his fingers in 
my face as if in derision? Why, 'tis all mockery, 
mockery, — earth, and sea, and sky, and the faces 
of children, and the roses in my garden ! Under^ 
neath all is the grinning visage and the castanets of 
Death !" 

"Yes ! yes !" he cried, with an impatience that 
rarely showed itself in his fine face or courtly 
manners. "But why anger? Don't you know that 
the inevitable is also the indispensable ; and that it 
would never do for ephemeral beings such as we to 
be brought face to face with immortal beauty ?" 



One hundred seventy Cedar Chips 



"There! You are always saying hard things," 
I cried. "The inevitable is the indispensable! 
What is it? What do you mean?" 

"What do I mean? Why, we have talked of 
these things a hundred times over, and yet you ask 
me what I mean. I mean simply this, that so long 
as we are but passing shadows, we are not capable 
of being confronted with infinite and permanent re- 
alities. That in fact, permanence is not for us, only 
the res caducae, the flitting and fading phantoms 
that belong to an order of things that preludes the 
stability of eternity. Hark, friend ! If all that splen- 
dour over which you now wept had remained, you 
would have tired of it in an hour and gone back 
to your books, murmuring: 'The eye is not filled 
with seeing; nor the ear satisfied with hearing.' " 

It was true; and I had only to take refuge in 
silence. 

"But mark how foolishly you spoke," he con- 
tinued. "You wept over a piece of painted vapour 
— a little aerial moisture reddened by the setting 
sun ; and you ridiculed what ? The mighty sun, 
Arcturus, to which your sun is but a farthing candle, 
and which is now lighting up with unimaginable 
splendour the atmospheres of planets, to which our 
little earth is but a sand-grain. It is the old, old 
story. We cling to shadows and weep for them ; and 
then blaspheme the Eternal." 



Cedar Chips One hundred seventy-one 



Mackxng tl|r ?£trrnal 

"But, but," I cried, confused, you speak thus 
because you are not mortal. You have no human 
feeling. You live amongst the stars. There is 
nothing but cold, frozen thought up there on the 
altitvides where you dwell with your poets and 
dreamers. Look, you, my friend, the tear that soils 
the cheek of a little child is more to me than if 
your Arcturus were to heave and burst his elephan- 
tine bulk, and strew all space with his fragments. 
This is our world ; and it is enough for us, at least 
whilst we are here." 

"Quite true," he replied. "Then why are you 
always dreaming, dreaming, dreaming of other 
things? Why did you sadden in that sunset? It 
was like yourself, transient and paltry. Why did 
you not accept it as such ? No ! You went out 
beyond it ; and you said it mocked you ; and you, in 
turn, mocked the Eternal." 

"It's enough to make any one savage," I cried, — 
"this eternal duplicity and deception of Nature. Lo ! 
splendours as of the third heavens, and behold, they 
are gone whilst we cry to them to remain forever !" 

" 'Tis not a subject for mockery, or savage an- 
ger," he said, meekly. 

"What then?" I cried. 

"Infinite Pity!" he said. 



One hundred seventy-two Cedar ChlDS 



"And men, with their infinite and ever-winding 
intrigues and deceptions?" 

"Infinite Pity!" he said. 

"And those white women, half-angels, until you 
suddenly see some flash of soul that reveals their 
deformity ?" 

"Infinite Pity!" he said. 

"And those placed aloft in the high domains of 
the world, to be burning and shining lights to their 
generation, until you come near and see the ilame 
of their spirit flickering, unsteady, darkened with 
the smut of carbon, and swaying to and fro in every 
gust of passion?" 

"Infinite Pity!" he said. 

"And mighty statesmen, ordering the destinies of 
nations, but prepared to change sides and principles 
for a piece of ribbon from a sovereign, or a whiff of 
popularity from the great unwashed!" 

"Infinite Pity!" he answered. 

"And teachers, — poets, preachers, prophets, with 
their 'everlasting yeas,' and 'everlasting noes,' lead- 
ing mankind by the hand up the steep escarpments 
where valour and truth alone can find a footing ; 
and then suddenly descending to the basest levels to 
cjuarrel over their cups, or play the valet to some 
coroneted patron?" 

"Infinite Pity !" he still answered. 



Cedar Chios ^"* hundred seventy-three 



A ItBttnrttnn 

I shook him off — this Doppclganger of mine. I 
was wroth with him and with myself, wroth, above 
all, because 1 had to determine was this the final 
answer — the last response to the eternal enigma. 

Infinite Pity ! 

For all suffering and harmless things, yes ! For 
the redbreast frozen into iron on a January morn- 
ing ; for the wounded creature of the woods that 
creeps into its hole to die unseen; for the silver 
wonder of the brooks that lies gasping on the grass, 
held in the fierce steel of the fisherman ; for my 
aged dog, who lies in his hutch in my yard and looks 
at me with such piteous dying eyes, they haunt me 
all the day long ; for our human brother or sister, 
who calls for night, and night forgets its mercy, 
and who watches the faint dawn glimmering through 
the window-pane, with the prospect of another day 
of anguish ; for the wretch in the dock, with the 
merciless faces around him, steeled against all com- 
passion by merciless law ; for the victim helped to 
the scaffold, his arms supported by warders lest he 
should fall ; for the last October sunset, and the last 
rose that hovers in my garden over beds of snow, — 
for all weak things, for all stricken things, for all 
sad things, and all dying things, — Infinite Pity ! 
Yes! By all means! But for all the strength that 
smites pitilessly; for all the cunning that intrigues 
successfully; for all the duplicity that lies boldly; 
for all the smiles that cheat blandly; for all the 
tyranny that grinds mercilessly ; for all that is strong 
and severe and pitiless ; for all that is loathsome and 
degrading and masculated, — Infinite Pity ? No ! 



One hundred seventy-four Cedar Ghips 



As the prophet of old foretold of the sweet and 
gentle Shepherd of Humanity, I think I could gather 
up and fold in my arms all tender, gentle, and frail 
things on earth, no matter how passion-swept, or 
into what deep abysses betrayed by their own inex- 
perience or the malevolence of others. Nay, even 
■for one that "wanders like a lost soul upon the 
Stygian bank, waiting for waftage," I feel I could 
have great pity, which is akin to great love. But 
for the base nature, that comes to you sometimes 
in life, rubbing his shoulder against yours to pick 
your pockets, tossing out carelessly and confidingly 
a petty secret to get at your sealed and solemn 
sorrows, and then snap you up, as Vivien did Merlin 
in the enchanted oak ; for the creature who comes 
fawning and purring around you, proffering his 
petty gifts, and protesting his disinterestedness until, 
thrown oflf your guard, you fling the creature what 
he wants, and he goes his way, his hand on the 
button of his pocket ; for all puny souls that have no 
circumference or scope of vision beyond that of a 
coin, and who think more of a piece of ribbon than 
of the colours of a sunset, and whose base insolence 
to the weak is hardly more irritating than their base 
subservience to the strong. — I confess to a feeling of 
repulsion akin to that one feels for slimy and dan- 
gerous things ; no great wish to crush or annihilate. 
but a decided desire to shun and avoid, and place 
some impassable thing, an ocean or a Sahara, be- 
tween us! 



Cedar Chios ^"* hundred seventy-five 



A iHltrarb of A&aptattnn 

And yet — are not these things, too, a subject for 
infinite wonder, — wonder at the miracle of adapta- 
tion that seems to exist everywhere ? For, after all, 
without moral evil how can there be moral virtue? 
If all men, by a miracle^ or rather by a transforma- 
tion of our nature from its striking and painful con- 
trasts, were reduced to a dead level of uniform 
goodness and perfection, where would be those trials 
that develop all the grandeur of the great and 
heroic? If Xanthippe did not create the genius of 
a Socrates, she at least has helped us to know 
him better. Without an Antiochus, should we have 
had the heroism of the Maccabees ; the grave chas- 
tity of Susannah, without the perfidy of the elders? 
Had there been no Nero or Domitian, where would 
be the superb record of the countless martyrs of the 
Coliseum? It needed the malice of a Gesler to 
create a William Tell, the state policy of Napoleon 
to paint on the pages of history the gentle bravery 
of the Due d'Enghien or the fearless manhood of 
Hofer. We could not weep for the martyred nuns 
of Compiegne had there been no Robespierre or 
Marat. And to ascend to the highest — where would 
have been the supreme tragedy of our race, if Jewish 
priests had been generous, and Pilate had hearkened 
to the plea for justice from the lips of his wife? 



One hundred seventy-six Cedar ChipS 



Etitl tl|r Mnut nf (^cah 

So, too, on a lowlier scale, we find that all good 
seems to arise from evil. Endurance cannot exist 
without hardship, patience without annoyance, se- 
renity without pain, joyousness without injustice, 
chastity without temptation, meekness without pro- 
vocation. If the world was reduced to one dead level 
of happiness, mankind would grow hebetated from 
want of energy. It was cold and hunger that framed 
the flint arrovv^heads and bone needles, the relics of 
pre-Adamite man over yonder in Kent's Cavern. It 
is the sense of the same evils that puts Australian 
beef on the London markets, and places the skin of 
an Arctic seal on the shoulders of some woman of 
fashion. Necessity, that is, pain, begets energy; 
and energy develops faculties that otherwise would 
weaken and perish from lack of exercise. In the 
moral order, it is the same. Moral evil begets 
Virtue. The narrow, distorted, and vicious soul, prone 
to deceit and aggression, and chuckling at its own 
trivial and transitory success over some larger and 
nobler mind, is quite unconscious that it has been 
the means, the fertilizing agent, of a larger growth 
in the latter. "All things cooperate unto good for 
those called to be saints," said the Apostle. And 
may not this principle be the strongest proof of 
immortality, — that the greatest evil shall produce 
the largest good, and from the dark and bitter root 
of death shall spring the undying flower of immor- 
tality? 



Cedar Chios ^^^ hundred seventy-seven 



®tJ|fr iEg^a ttjan ®ura 

In the higher life, I often think that the same 
inability to penetrate into the minds and under- 
stand the feelings of others lies at the root of all 
these racial and religious prejudices that have 
wrought such havoc to humanity. It is the rarest of 
rare talents — this of being able to see things through 
other eyes than ours. If one considers for a mo- 
ment that each mind has its own idiosyncrasies, and 
clings to its own infallibility, it is easy to understand 
the difficulty of reconciling the repellent tendencies 
and mutual antipathies that must exist between races 
and religions. Home influences, early education, 
later reading of one-sided and prejudiced books, the 
interchange of common and hostile ideas on one 
subject — must of necessity create a bulwark of 
prejudice that it seems impossible to break through 
or subvert. We all know the totally absurd opinions 
that are entertained towards churches of different 
denominations, — towards members of a hostile race, 
or a hostile political party. In the vast majority of 
such cases the prejudices are irremovable and in- 
eradicable. No amount of reasoning can convince ; 
no appeal can soften. They have never learned to 
go outside themselves and see through others' eyes. 
Man, to be wise, must study the vices and virtues 
of which human nature is capable, first in himself, 
and then, in all good faith, in others. 



One hundred seventy-eight Cedar ChioS 



I well remember a distinguished convert to the 
Catholic Church telling me that, when a boy, and 
even when he had passed into adolescence, he never 
j^assed the humble and modest Catholic church in 
the city where he lived, without flying past it at 
racing speed. When I asked him what he dreaded, 
he answered he didn't know ! It was nothing speci- 
fic ; but some vague sensation that there was some- 
thing inside those walls horrible beyond imagina- 
tion ; some occult and dark doings, which were not 
to be examined or approached, but fled from in ter- 
ror. It was clearly his early education, — the home 
and Sunday-school teaching that the Catholic 
Church stood for something unnameable — that it 
was the symbol of darkness, the outer shell and 
simulacrum of everything men shrink from and 
avoid. Probably that man would have carried these 
prejudices to his grave if he had not met with some 
one who saw through his eyes, made account of all 
his perverse imaginations, and gradually opened the 
eyes of his mind to see what horrible and unreal 
phantasms had been haunting it, and how needful 
it was to employ the prompt exorcism of reason to 
expel them for ever. And strange to say^ this was 
but an accident, — the accident of his sister's con- 
version, and the accident of his proceeding to Lon- 
don in a frenzy of zeal and anger, first to remon- 
strate with the priest who had received her into the 
Church, and then to convert that priest from the 
errors of Catholicism. He met his Ananias, and 
the scales fell from his eyes. 



Cedar Chios ^"^ hundred seventy-nine 



©I|p Mtahnm nf lExpvtitntt 

But if we were to suppose, per impossible, that 
we could stand by the side of our brothers who 
differ so widely and radically from us, and with a 
sympathy born of Christian charity could enter into 
their passionate prejudices and feelings, and make 
allowance for all the converging causes that led up 
to this hardening of the heart, and think what we 
ourselves might have been had we been born and 
educated in similar circumstances, how it would 
widen our horizon of thought, help us to look 
around things, instead of merely at them, and help 
us to deal gently with all those unmeaning and irra- 
tional ideas that grow so slowly and take such deep 
and almost ineradicable root in human souls. The 
thoughts of men on all possible subjects differ as 
widely as their features ; and even where they ex- 
ternally seem to agree, that is, when placed in words 
or actions, there is still a profound difference. And 
we must not suppose that all the wisdom of world 
is stored up and centered beneath the dura mater of 
our brain. Qui vit sans folic nest pas si sage qu'il 
croit; and whatever wisdom or knowledge we pos- 
sess comes mainly through experience, which al- 
ways teaches the kindred and collateral lesson of 
our own impotence and folly. 



One hundred eighty Cedar ChipS 



No man can judge of insanity but the insane. 
There are as many forms of insanity as there are 
brain-cells ; and, if you look over the motor and 
sensory areas, and try to study the internal construc- 
tion and ramification of each with its millions of 
cells, and remember how one diseased cell might 
easily set up that want of proportion in ideas, or 
that lack of nerve control which we designate as in- 
sanity, it is easy to perceive the value of the opin- 
ions of experts. There is no stronger argument 
against capital punishment than the impossibility of 
determining who is sane, and who is insane ; and 
there is something pathetic and tragic in the curious 
tradition that a man's life may be made dependent 
on the opinion of two experts who, presumably sane 
themselves, are utterly unqualified to express an 
opinion on the condition of the insane. The secret 
working of the brain-cells of a Plato or a Shakes- 
peare is not more of a mystery to a Hottentot, who 
has just emerged into civilization than the secret 
working of the diseased brain is to one who has 
never had experience in his own mind of that phe- 
nomenal, and yet quite common disturbance. Few 
men pass through life without acting once at least 
in an insane manner; and if we could read human 
thoughts as Omniscience does, what a vast and 
tumultuous asylum would not this earth appear ! 
"This beautiful madhouse of the earth," said Jean 
Paul. "Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound 
and fury, signifying nothing." saith Shakespeare. 



Cedar Chips One hundred eighty-one 



The senses, the imagination, the words of men, 
traditions, the habits of life all around us, the stere- 
otyped forms and manners of society, the lies that 
are fossilized by the ages, the tricks and pranks that 
mask deception under an appearance of bonhomie, 
and, above all, our own poor selves seem to be en- 
gaged in a horrid conspiracy to make our lives one 
long delusion until our final consunimutum. To 
know that happiness is in ourselves, and not in our 
circumstances ; to be able to take the ordinary and 
accredited beliefs of men and sift them, and ex- 
amine them, and separate the chafif of folly from 
the grain of wisdom ; to look out with our own eyes 
upon the world, and to take sidelights on human 
happenings and events from others' experience, — is 
a very rare talent. We run amuck with the crowd 
when the panic of life seizes us. We follow its 
train of thought, adopt its habits, walk in its ways, 
although we loathe ourselves for so doing. It is a 
rare thing to see a strong man step aside and pur- 
sue his own course undeterred by human hostile 
opinion ; who has the strength of silent scorn to up- 
hold him, and let the mad world wag on to destruc- 
tion. "Oh, all you that pass by the way," saith the 
beggar with the crucifix, whilst the gay and happy 
pairs of youthful lovers, conning flowers or toying 
with jewels, pass down the staircases and corridors' 
of life. "Come apart and rest a little while/' was 
the sweet invitation of the Divine Being, who knew 
how easily his poor disciples would throng after the 
ruck and rout of motley crowds to share in their 
poor, sickly, and dishonest adulation. "Come apart," 
— into the desert aloof and alone, — the silent stars 
above your heads, and the Eternal One by your side. 



One hundred eighty-two Cedar ChipS 



An SxampU 

I once knew a man of imaginative temperament 
who laboured all his life long under a singular de- 
lusion. He was a merchant in a great city ; and, like 
all other merchants, his daily life was the drudgery 
of living from ten o'clock in the morning to six 
o'clock in the evening in a damp, dirty office, 
screened away from a vault filled with vast punch- 
eons of wine and spirits, cobwebbed and grey with 
the dust of antiquity. The office window, very dirty 
also, and lined with venerable cobwebs, barely al- 
lowed the eye to rest on the blank wall of another 
warehouse about six feet across a narrow alley. 
Even in Summer and at noonday the gas flared 
above his desk ; and through the twilight the figures 
of men — porters., labourers, customers — passed to 
and fro all day long to exchange opinions and trans- 
act business. The daily programme of the poor 
slave was : 

Rise at 8 A. M. 

Breakfast at <S :-15. 

Train to citv. 

Office work from 10 A. M. to 6 P. M. 

Train homewards. 

Dinner at 7 P. M. 

Newspaper. 

Bed, 10 P. M. 

Sunday was broken by a morning service and an 
afternoon that seemed interminable. He took a 
yearly holiday at some European watering-place 
where he was killed from ennui and society. 



Cedar Chips One hundred eighty-three 



Ollfatnfb in a (Erllar 

He was a wealthy man, but not a happy man. 
During his first twenty years, buoyed up and carried 
on by the stream of youthful hopefulness and ambi- 
tion, he really exulted in his work, although the 
frictions of daily life began to wear down his 
nerves, and the question would persistently arise 
and refuse an answer: "Whereunto tends all this 
waste and work?"' Then, one day, he took up a 
volume of essays dealing with the attractions of 
country life ; the folly of treading the daily mill until 
we dropped into the grave ; and the wisdom of saying 
at some period or other of life, "Soul, sleep now, 
and take thy rest !" The idea haunted him for weeks 
and weeks ; and the recollection of a certain pretty 
villa down near the sea, where he had spent a few 
summer weeks, came up at ofifice-time to disturb 
his serenity, and compel him to think that he was 
spending all the most glorious years of his life — a 
slave chained in a cellar. One day, too, a farming 
acquaintance of his dropped in, and, looking in a 
half -frightened way about the lugubrious place, said : 
"Good heavens, man, surely you don't live here? 
Why, one hour of these wine-smells and spirit- 
odours would chloroform me into eternity! Come 
out, man, and live a human life! Come out, and see 
our trees and rivers, and hear the winds whistling, 
and the brooks laughing, and the birds singing, and 
breathe the honest air of heaven, and not the me- 
phitic vapours of the tomb." The merchant shook 
his head, but the lesson went home. 



One hundred eighty.four Cedar Chips 



He now bent eagerly to his task, because he had 
a definite object before him, — namely, to build up 
as rapidly as possible a fortune that would help him 
to get away from the chain-gang and the format, and 
spend the evening of his life in tranquil study (for 
he was a reader) and calm contemplation and en- 
joyment of nature unto the end. One morning he 
noticed a grey patch over his left ear; and he 
thought, I must push on and work harder, if I am 
to have time for my evening holiday at the end. 
And all the time that villa above the sea would float 
in a misty picture, framed in cloud shadows, but 
richly gilded, above his dusty, ink-stained desk ; and 
every night, as he closed the latter with a snap, he 
looked around and said : "Only a little longer ; a 
few years more, and farewell, you dusty wine-bins 
and cobwebbed bottles, for ever and ever!" And 
then he began to watch the papers for advertise- 
ments of sales of seaside villas; and he began to 
dream, and dream, and ever dream of vast, beau- 
tiful oceans, with the white flame of a sail on the 
horizon, and long, purple twilights that dreamed 
themselves away into night, and a dusky library 
crammed with all precious volumes, and peace, peace, 
and rest, rest, for the long evenings of a happy life! 



Cedar Chips One hundred dghly-five 



At last the wished-for opportunity seemed to 
arise in accordance with his wishes. He had seen 
in the late springtime just the thing he had dreamed 
of so long, — the long white villa facing the ocean, 
the little lawn in front sloping gently downwards ; 
the sudden, abrupt clifif, the waves crawling or tum- 
bling in hoarse riotousness beneath ; and, behind, the 
deep, dewy fields of a valley, where a brown cow 
was grazing calmly, and a few sheep dotted the 
upland beyond, where the trees fringed the hori/on 
and broke up the blue radiance of the sky. If he 
could have designed into actual existence the place 
and the circumstances he had so often desired, it 
could not have been better framed unto his wishes. 
With beating heart he read the legend "To Let" on 
the window-pane, and hastened to inquire — and pur- 
chase. He was so eager now to get away from the 
wine cave and the cellar that he would not hire the 
place. No ! he should become the absolute owner, 
so that no man could ever disturb his inheritance of 
such an elysium. It should be his from the zenith 
to the nadir, — from the centre of the earth tO' the 
dome of heaven ; and no man should venture on the 
sacred precincts without license or on trespass. He 
was surprised^ almost shocked, to find how little was 
asked for it. He closed the bargain at once, and 
became the happy possessor. 



One hundred eighty-six ^cdar ChipS 



Then the ravens began to croak. They predicted 
that he would tire of the place in a month, in a 
quarter, at furthest in a year. "Wait," they said, 
"till November. Wait till the rains come down and 
the sea is blotted out, and he shall not see from 
week's end to week's end the face of a human being, 
except a half-tipsy fisherman or a strait-laced coast 
guard. Then he will pine for the electric light and 
tram, for the roar and bustle of the city." He heard 
it all, and calmly winked to himself. Envy! envy! 
The bane of gods and men ! The ever-present, never- 
exorcised demon that haunts all human hearts, and 
makes them sink at the thought of others' happiness ! 
No matter : he will go on in spite of all ; nay, he 
will bring down all these croakers in the early Sum- 
mer and kill them, one by one, by the spectacle of 
his happiness ! Well, he did bring them down, but 
happily there was no homicide. They came, ad- 
mired, rejoiced, and departed. He showed them how 
easily and pleasantly one could slip down in undress 
in the early, warm summer morning, and descend- 
ing the spiral iron ladder, plunge at once into the 
glorious sea. He taught them how to lounge, and 
kill time, and loll upon garden chairs after dinner, 
and smoke away the long, delicious summer even- 
ings, and play nap in the open air, and drink — • 
sherbet? And if any landsman tired of the sea, 
he took him to the valley and expatiated upon cows 
and corn. 



Cedar Chips One hundred eighty-seven 



A 3Fragttirnt of lEJipu 

They all admitted that it was glorious, delicious, 
a fragment of Eden very much improved, because 
for the sluggish Tigris here was the heaving and 
restless, the treacherous and magic sea. They all 
said how delightful it was to go to sleep with your 
high windows open, and the breath of the clover 
was borne into your bedroom with the murmurs 
of the enchanted sea ; and how transcendently pleas- 
ant it was to sit down to one's breakfast after an ap- 
petising morning bath, and break your egg or fish 
whilst you glanced at the broad levels of shining 
sea before the window. But those evenings, those 
celestial evenings, when the setting sun empurpled 
the great cliffs opposite, and the vast mirror of the 
ocean modestly mirrored in pink and gold the gor- 
geous decorations of rock and headland ; and tiny 
feathers of yacht-sails, or the larger canvases of 
fishing-boats swept as in a hollow mirror from rim 
to rim of the horizon; and the plash of oars came 
up from the sea; and the mufBed voices of young 
girls came borne in upon the warm breeze ; and the 
great moon came up blood-red from her sea-bath 
and paled into yellow glory as she mounted her 
steep escarpment of the sky, — ah, those celestial 
evenings ! No wonder anxious hearts should whis- 
per, in affected depreciation : "You have no chance 
of heaven, old man, after this!" 



One hundred eighty-eighl Cedar ChipS 



"3il|at a fara&iBp!" 

But he would only laugh — the happy possessor 
always laughs — and pufif away at his cigar in happy 
contentment, and rail at the dusty city, and the 
noises and the cobwebbed cellar, and say: "My dear 
fellow, half the world does not know what life is." 

And the young men applauded and said : 

"Quite right. When you've made your pile, it 
is wise and right to step down and aside, and leave 
a chance for the young." 

But the old men, although they hankered after 
such freedom and happiness, whispered to each 
other as they sped upwards to the city by the even- 
ing train : 

"Do you know, I think old seemed to 

look wistfully after us. Wait till November! I'd 
bet a dozen of the best Havanas he'll be back in his 
office again!" 

But their wives said : 

"What a delightful place for children to play 
in for three months of Summer! What a shame 
that such a place should be in the hands of a 
wretched old bachelor!" 

They had just been praising his cook, and his 
dinners, and his delicious tea ; they had still wet on 
their pretty lips : 

"Oh, Mr. , what a Paradise!" 



Cedar Chips ^"^ hundred eighty-nine 



And so the weeks sped on. The "Villa" had 
almost become a show place. Every visitor to the 
seaside should see it, and praise it. The owner was 
very happy. 

Sometimes, indeed, the days dragged heavily on- 
ward. It was not always sunshine. There were 
times when a cold, grey look was on the sea, and 
the cliffs in the distance across the bay looked 
black and threatening ; and one by one, the visitors 
were departing for their winter homes, and the 
faces of the little children began to disappear. Then 
the terrific tyranny of old habits began to assert 
itself. The holiday was over; and every fibre and 
muscle began to clamor for old occupations, — the 
never-ceasing, ever-rolling routine of hours conse- 
crated to business, and hostile to slothfulness. He 
argued and expostulated against the tyranny in 
vain. He pleaded that he had had a life of unre- 
mitting toil and anxiety ; that he had a right to rest 
in the evening of life : that he was past labour now ; 
and that peace and dignity were the rightful per- 
quisites and perogatives of age. In vain ! Every 
faculty was clamouring for employment, protesting 
against the degredation of being wasted away in 
rusty sloth ; and the imagination, spurred by the 
tyranny of habit, and beaten back upon itself by 
the frigid aspect of external nature, began to call 
up with tender and solemn pity the days of labour 
that had passed ; the fifty years in the warehouse ; 
and all the many circumstances, which, bald and 
vulgar and prosaic enough in reality, came now 
from the caves of the past under the softened and 
hallowed light of memory, the great transformer, 
and scene-shifter, and stage-manager of life. 



One hundred ninety Cedar ChipS 



He tried to shake off the despondency, but in 
vain. He set himself, during these sad September 
days, to the task of reading and working. He laid 
out a programme for the Winter months. He would 
read Shakespeare through and through. He com- 
menced. After half an hour's conscientious labour 
on "Hamlet" he grew tired, and went out. Yes! 
there was the calm, irresponsive, Sphinx-like face 
of the sea, cold and grey like that battered and 
mutilated demon-face that stares over the desert 
sands, and seems to be contemplating infinity from 
eternity. He went back to his beautiful library, 
sick at heart. The early fires were burning in the 
grate, — of summer valedictory, of winter premon- 
itory. The beautiful books in all manner of costly 
bindings gleamed from the shelves ; and between 
them and above them, shone fair pictures, with 
deep, rich, gorgeous frames ; and lapping their 
edges were fairy palms and costly evergreens, pur- 
chased in the richest nurseries in the city. What 
do I want? the man cried. Here is what I have 
been seeking after for thirty years ; and lo ! it is 
ashes in my mouth. He went out again. Not a sail 
flamed across the surface of the deep ; not a fishing- 
boat made a speck across the grey monotony. And 
all was silent, songs of maidens, laughter of chil- 
dren, except with the sounds of eternity. 



Cedar Chios ^"^ hundred ninety-one 



Two hours to luncheon ! He took his cane and 
went out. He called on the curate, asked, begged, 
implored him to dine with him. He had not trou- 
bled much about him while the summer visitors 
were flitting around. He strolled over the cliffs. 
A few peasants were digging out potatoes ; the 
white sheep nibbled lazily the short grass ; far be- 
neath, the waves rolled heavily in, heaving as if in 
gasps of spent energy their bulk of water against 
the broken boulders ; the grey, solemn light lay 
brooding over sea and land ; far away, far, far away, 
on the horizon line, a plurne of dark vapour marked 
the course of a passing ship. And everywhere si- 
lence, deep, terrible silence as of chaos before the 
turbulent voices of humanity were heard ; as of a 
ruined world, when the voice of humanity will be 
heard no more, — silence, except for the wash of 
the waters, that would be soothing perhaps to tired 
and worn nerves, but that now sounded harsh and 
hoarse in the ears of the man who had passed 
out of touch with nature, because he had stepped 
out of his place, and refused to take his part in the 
vast working-sheds and laboratories of the universe. 



One hundred ninety-two Cedar ChipS 



He lunched with little appetite, and drank more 
than was good for him. Then he lounged along 
the lawn and smoked cigar after cigar. Twenty 
times he looked at his watch, and counted the hours 
to dinner. He took up "Hamlet" again; and re- 
mained for some time brooding over the soliloquy 
of suicide. He flung down the book, and went out. 
He tried to get into conversation with a few rough, 
weather-tanned fishermen, who lounged up against 
the quay wall. He could only elicit a monosyllable. 
He walked over the cliffs again ; and after another 
two hours of misery, he returned to dinner. The 
good-natured curate was there. Two hours passed 
pleasantly by. Then a sick-call was brought, and 
the man was again alone, — alone with one word 
the curate, with no ill intention, had spoken: "How 
in God's name, can you live here, after your ex- 
perience of city life?" He brooded over it the 
whole evening through. He went to bed in a cheer- 
less mood, and dreamt that the spirit of the Sea, 
the Old Man of the Sea, stood beside his bed, and 
kept murmuring all the night through, — "Alone!" 
"Alone!" "Alone!" He woke up in the dreary 
dawn, and heard the hoarse wash of the sea mur- 
muring: "Alone!" "Alone!" "Alone!" 



Oedar Chios ^°^ hundred ninety-three 



And suddenly, swiftly, as if in a sudden eclipse 
of light and cessation of sound, the Winter closed 
in. There never had been so short a Summer. 
There had been no Autumn. The days seemed to 
close up, as you would close a telescope ; and the 
nights swooped down and hung their raven wings, 
poised above the desolation of nature, as if they 
could never close and vanish again. The dreadful 
loneliness and idleness hung heavily on the spirit of 
the man. He began to loathe the face of the sea. 
It seemed to stare back on him from its great ex- 
panses, cold and colourless as a corpse ; and the 
great cliffs beyond seemed to close in like walls of 
a grave of granite^ so dark and gloomy, so hard and 
adamantine they seemed. He ceased gazing on the 
gloomy spectacle, and turned aside to the valley. 
Here, too, was all the aspect of wintry desolation — 
heavy fogs morning and evening, withered brack- 
en, blanched grass which the cows ate reluctantly, 
and broken mangolds which his workmen had scat- 
tered here and there across the field. And if he 
lifted his eyes, there afar off was the thin dark line 
of the horizon, where the cold blue light seemed to 
shiver under the lowering and ragged skies. 



One hundred ninety-four Cedar ChipS 



A OlriHtH 

To accentuate his misery, the morning paper 
brought news of the great city, — of its theatres, with 
new plays and brilliant companies ; of its concerts, 
where world-famed artists sang for money or char- 
ity ; of great balls with military bands, and long 
columns of the names of citizens well-known to him ; 
and the vision of the brilliant and well-lighted city, 
of its long rows of gas lamps and electric lamps, of 
its rumbling tramcars, its wet pavements, the crowds 
of men and women passing to and fro, and all the 
human and even tender associations which are every- 
where leagued with great masses of humanity, rose 
up before him as he sauntered in melancholy mad- 
ness above the sea, or stared, with his finger in the 
pages of the unread book, at the coals that sparkled 
and burned in the grate by his lonely hearthside. 
It was so sad, nothing but shame and the dread of 
being laughed at kept him from fleeing instantly 
from the uncanny place. Then one day his two 
servants gave notice simultaneously. It capped his 
climax of misery. Next evening he was in the city. 



Cedar Chios ^^'^ hundred ninely-five 



Sark Again 

Although he had been but a few weeks absent, 
he felt like a stranger in a strange land. The tumult 
of the streets thrilled him through and through; 
the vibration of the tramcar seemed to penetrate 
his nerves, and he trembled as he rose up awk- 
wardly from the seat, and groped his way with 
many a stop and stumble towards the entrance. He 
glided like a shamed ghost through the streets, 
afraid to be recognized ; afraid of the Hallo, old 
man! which would mean insufferable things. He 
watched with the interest of a child who had come 
up to the city for the first time, the lighted shops, 
the sparkling jewelry, the long counters in ware- 
houses, with their lines of well-groomed clerks and 
well-dressed girls, curious, watchful, eager; he 
sniffed up the odours from the restaurants as a 
hungry man maddened with the want of food ; he 
could almost have hugged the newsboys, who shout- 
ed : B-e-evening Echo-o-o! At last he stood at 
the entrance to the narrow street where the oflfices 
and warehouses were, and paused. How would he 
enter? How face the welcome he was sure to re- 
ceive; or worse still, the smiles and winks of his 
employes, with their deadly., yet kindly meaning: / 
told you! 



One hundred ninety-six Cedar Chips 



A Sramatir Sntrg 

He did the wisest thing he could do under the 
circumstances. He entered the old premises dra- 
matically. That is — he almost leaped in upon the 
sawdusted flags, shouted to the alarmed porters 
and labourers: "Clear out of my way!" pushed 
one or two aside, who thought an escaped maniac 
had got amongst them, and then took a hop, step 
and jump, and landed safely in his old chair beside 
the grimy, ink-covered desk. When he was recog- 
nised there was a shout of laughter, and all was 
over. The ancient partner came in. 

"You've come back?" 

"Yes! Don't say, for God's sake, 'I knew it!' 
or *I told you so!' " 

"All right!" 

"I'll take my old place and hand you back the 
rhino !" 

"Very good. 'Twas a tight shave though. Mc- 
Allister wanted to throw ten thousand into the 
concern to-day." 

"You didn't?" with a face of alarm. 

"No! I expected something. See! your name 
is yet on our bill-heads !" 

"Thanks, old man! Now, tell me. is the old 
house let as yet?" 



Cedar Chios ^"^^ hundred ninety-seven 



"I'm not sure. I think not. The bills were in 
the window last Sunday." 

"Would you — would you — mind seeing after it 
for me?" 

"All right. To-morrow, or perhaps Thursday — " 

"Great Scott, man ! Some pedler will have swal- 
lowed it up by then. Look here! 'Tis only five 
o'clock. Run down to Henry's, will you?" 

"All right. You're in the deuce of a fright." 

"No matter. And ask Henry to put in an ad. 
to-morrow : 

"To be let or sold. Beautiful marine villa ; 
splendid sea view ; lawn ; spiral staircase to sea ; 
beach; meadow-land, etc., etc. But — no name! mind, 
no name!" 

"All right ! Of course, you're coming to us until 
you settle?" 

"May I ? You're too good. But how can I 
face Kate? She'll torment the life out of me!" 

"Never fear! She's too glad to see you back. 
And won't the youngsters kick up the deuce of a 
shindy !" 

"Gosh ! I hope they will. Let me see. I have 
time to run down to London. I must bring them 
something. You'll come back, won't you, and tell 
us about the house?" 



One hundred ninely-eight Cedar Chips 



Then he sank into a pleasant reverie, watching 
all the while the corpulent and pompous puncheons, 
and seeming to expect every moment a salvo from 
the vast tiers of wine bottles that seemed like tiny- 
batteries of artillery peeping from their loopholes 
and embrasures. When no one was looking, he 
stepped softly down from his desk, and going over 
he actually kissed the steel ribs of an old Jack 
Falstaff of a whiskey cask, that had shone and 
glistened in its dusty cave for half a century. Then 
closing-time came, his partner returned, and he 
stepped out on the wet pavement again. For a 
moment he watched the crowd of people passing 
and repassing, a motley crowd, made up of every 
element of humanity, from the young empresses 
who, clad in their furs and sealskins, seemed to 
spurn the very flags beneath their feet, to the poor, 
decrepit creatures who begged an alms, or the 
wretched and degraded humanity which gathered 
around the doors of saloons. Then, with a sigh 
and a little smile he passed on, paused for a mo- 
ment, and leaned over the parapet of the bridge 
and saw a Milky Way of lights on quays and ships 
and waves, and then, humbled and happy, he ac- 
companied his partner to his hospitable home. 



Cedar Chios ^°* hundred ninety-nine 



A few weeks later he came in as usual one morn- 
ing to business, put up his overcoat and hat., sorted, 
opened, and read his letters, wrote his replies, gave 
his little orders here and there, read the morning 
paper, and went out to a neighbouring restaurant 
at the men's dinner hour, for a modest lunch. When 
one o'clock had struck, and the porters and labour- 
ers trooped back from dinner, they found him asleep 
in his office chair. It was unusual, but they did not 
mind. "Old age!" they said. Later on in the day, 
he still slept ; and then they thought he was un- 
usually still. They shook him up and called his 
name. There was no answer, — none until the Great 
Assize. He had died at his task, — chained as he 
would have said with bitterness a few months ago, 
chained like a galley-slave to his task. But the bit- 
terness had disappeared under the test of experi- 
ence. He had died in harness, in the midst of his 
work ; and what death could be more honourable or 
desirable ? 



Two hundred ' Cedar Chips 



A darbru lialngup 

As I closed these random reflections on things in 
general, I sat in my garden in the twilight of a long 
summer evening. The sun had set, and the faint 
light was wavering between day and night. A huge 
bat was flying round and round in circles that seemed 
to be grooved for him in the air. Over my head a tiny 
spider hung down on a single thread. There was an 
odour of jasmine and mignonette in the warm air. 
Close to my head was a thick clump of laurel ; and 
one white tea-rose hung her beautiful petals against 
it as if for support. On the rim of one fair petal 
was a brown line, the first symptom and harbinger 
of decay. The air was so still I could hear her say : 

"Why am I sad?" you ask. "Because in a few 
weeks, a few days, I shall be dead, — buried there 
beneath the brown earth, whilst you are a perennial, 
an immortal !" 

"And is death an evil, and is immortality on 
earth a boon?" asked the spirit of the laurel. 

"Certainly," said the rose. "Even my short life 
beneath the blue sky, kissed by the winds, fanned 
by the wings of birds, has been supremely happy." 

"True, but see what is before me!" said the 
spirit of the laurel. "I have no Summer like you, 
because I am not a flower. But I have a Winter 
before me, and many, many Winters. Think of 
eight hours of pallid sunshine, and sixteen hours 
of darkness deep as the pit ; think of the rough 
winds that tear through me, the frosts that bite me, 
the snows that lean their icy burden on me, the 
lightnings that blast me, the men who shear and 
clip every little tiny shoot I put forth, until now, 
in my old age, I am childless and flowerless as the 
grave. Oh, my little sister, grieve not. You have 
been loved. That atones for death. Do not covet 
an immortality of loveless desolation !" 

And the rose said : 

"Yea. Be it so. Only let me lean against thee 
until the last." 



Index 



Two hundred one 



ilubfx 



(3Frmn "Mnftrr thp Qlp^are an^ tlit Stars'*) 

PAGE 

Finelon § 65 Autumn 1 

Lacordaire § 66 " 2 

The Cure of Ars §67 " 3 

Lamennais § 68 '" 4 

Latent Power of the Priesthood § 69 " 5 

Cataract Days § 6 Winter 6 

Their Advantages § 7 " 7 

Faded Letters § 8 '• 8 

Kant and Fichte § 9 " 10 

A Refusal § 10 " 11 

L. S. D §11 " 12 

Diaries § 12 " 13 

Their Teachings § 13 " 14 

Peace Through Holiness §14 " 15 

Cardinal Newman § 15 " 16 

The Luxury of Unhappiness §16 " 17 

Hospitals § 17 " 18 

Prisons and Asylums §18 " 19 

Minor Evils §19 " 30 

An Examination of Life §20 " 21 

The Veil of Mercy §21 " 22 

The Ordering of Destiny §22 " 23 

Philosophers and Poets §25 " 24 

The Victim of Envy §30 " 25 

St. Augustine and Maine de Biran §45 " 26 

La Soif dc Dieu §46 " 27 

Solitude §47 '• 28 



Two hundred two \n^' 



ex 



PAGE 

The Equilibrium of Things § 48 Winter 29 

Uit Philosophe Manque § 49 " 30 

Great Writers and the Church §83 " 31 

Ruskin §84 " 32 

Work and Prayer § 85 " 33 

The Contemplative Orders § 86 " 34 

God, or Man §87 " 35 

The Thorns of Literature §100 " 36 

Ambition §101 " 37 

Balzac and His Sister §103 " :^8 

Bohemians §103 " 39 

Pascal §104 " 40 

The Judgment of Posterity §105 " 41 

Renan and His Sister §106 " 42 

A Vitriolic Censor § 25 Spring 43 

Poet and Friar § 30 " 44 

The Worker in Iron §31 " 45 

A Brothers' Quarrel § 32 " 46 

Bice §33 " 47 

Prayers for the Dead §34 " 48 

Bice's Dream §35 " 49 

Purgatory §36 " 50 

The Two Keys: Charity and Prayer § 37 " 51 

Schelling's Three Religions §38 " 52 

The Millennium of Love § 39 " 53 

The Solution : Self-Sacrifice §40 " 54 

Power and Humility §41 " 55 

Characters in Dickens §42 " 56 

The Strength of Humility §43 " 57 

The Omnipotence of Christ §44 " 58 

Quousque ? § 45 " 59 

Conquests of Christianity §46 " 60 

To Understand is to Forgive §47 " 61 



Index Two hundred three 

PAGE 

The Intellectually-Throned §59 Spring 62 

The Pain of High-Thinking §60 " 63 

A Big Blaze §61 " 64 

The Flowers at Night §62 '* 65 

In the Spring Dawn §63 " 66 

The Meekness of Flowers §64 " 67 

Upas Leaves § 65 " 68 

The Beauty of Fire §66 " 69 

Siris § 67 " 70 

Berkeley and Malebranche §68 " 71 

Recreations §69 " 72 

Tea-Table Talk §70 " 73 

In Former Days §71 " 74 

Via Dolorosa § 72 " 75 

The Evening of Life §73 " 76 

The Earth Cure §74 " 77 

Imploring Peace § 75 " 78 

Similarity of Features §78 "' 79 

Benedict J. Labre §79 " 80 

A Study §80 •• 81 

His Purity and Humility §81 " 82 

A Saint § 82 " 83 

The Desire for Contempt §83 " 84 

Commanding Esteem §84 " 85 

The Judgments of Men § 85 " 80 

Serenity § 86 " 87 

Evening in Great Cities § 8 Summer 88 

An Island Prison § 9 " 89 

A Monastery §10 " 90 

Ant Pati, Aiit Mori . ., § 11 " 91 

The Immutability of Hope §12 " 92 

Philanthropy § 13 " 93 

A Collegium Christi §14 " 94 

Masked Faces § 15 " 95 

Unmasked § 16 " 96 

Progress § 1 7 " 97 

/ 



nr 



Two hundred four 



Ind 



ex 



Rest § 36 Summer 98 

A Briton § 37 

Bronzed and Ruddy Irish § 38 

A Summer Evening § 39 

A Family Party § 40 

Is This the Solution ? § 41 



Introspection and Neurotic Literature. . .§ 46 

The Weltschmerz § 47 

Will It Last? § 48 

An Amiel, or Senancour Impossible § 49 

The Man of Letters § 50 

The One Enemy § 51 

This People of Destiny § 52 

Literature Our Ally § 53 

The Great Travelled § 63 

Lesser Experiences § 64 

Is Travel a Necessity ? § 65 

Nervous Irritability § 66 

Travel and Education § 67 

Lord Bacon § 6S 

What Might Interest § 69 

A Dialogue § 70 

[Recollections of Travel § 71 

Scenes From Memory § 7:i 

Minor Troubles § 73 

Two Classes § 74 

Memorj' and Art § 75 

The Magic of Childhood § 76 

All Great Work Unconscious § 77 

The Unrevealcd § 7 A 

The Pleasure of Novelty § 79 

A Cunarder § 80 

Incognito § SI 

Reticence and Reverence § 82 

The Glamor of the Sea § 83 

The Unl)ounded § 85 



99 
100 
101 
102 
103 

104 

105 
106 
107 
lOS 
109 
110 
111 

112 
113 
114 
115 
116 
117 
118 
119 
120 
121 
122 
123 
124 
125 
126 
127 
128 
120 
130 
131 
132 
133 



Index 



Two hundred five 



( If tarn "^arprga") 

PAGE 

Three Questions § 84 Autumn 137 

Sentiment § 73 Spring 138 

Contrasts of Life § 50 " 139 

A Defeat §51 " 140 



A Returned Exile § 17 Autumn 141 

Death, the Hope-Giver § 18 " 142 

Tlie Man With the Hoe § 39 Summer 143 

Idleness §40 " 144 

Some Great Ideal §41 " 145 

Epitaphs § 42 " 146 

An Impartial but Unreasonable Thing... § 22 Autumn 147 

A Personal Diagnosis § 23 " 148 

A Secret Science § 24 " 149 

Other Sciences §27 " 150 

Theology a Commonage §26 " 151 

The Great Rebellion § 27 " 152 

An Unscientific Departure §28 " 153 

Theology a Science §29 " 154 

No Mystery in Medicine § 30 " 155 

Ultra Crepidam § 31 " 156 

An Autumnal Type § 51 " 157 

Guarda e Passa § 52 " 158 

A Philosopher § 53 " 159 

Another Type § 54 " 160 

Early Education § 55 " 161 

Disillusion § 56 '" 162 

Education and Experience §57 '" 163 

Justice Blind §58 " 164 

A Fagin University §59 " 165 



Two hundred six \u^ 



ex 



PAGE 

Cirrhi and Cumuli § 61 Autumn 166 

An Evening Star §62 " 167 

My Doppelganger § 63 " 168 

An Apology for Anger § 64 " 169 

Res Caducae § 65 " 170 

Mocking the Eternal §66 " 171 

Infinite Pity §67 " 172 

A Distinction §68 " 173 

A Good Shepherd §69 " 174 

The Miracle of Adaptation §70 " 175 

Evil the Root of Good §71 " 176 

Otlier Eyes than Ours § 71 Summer 177 

Early Prejudices § 72 " 178 

The Wisdom of Experience §73 " 179 

The Insane §74 " 180 

Delusions §75 " 181 

An Example § 76 " 182 

Chained in a Cellar § 77 " 183 

Only a Little Longer §78 " 184 

"To Let" §79 " 185 

Ridiculed §80 ' 186 

A Fragment of Eden §81 " 187 

"What a Paradise" ! §82 " 188 

Memory §83 " 189 

Despondency § 84 " 190 

Loneliness §85 " 191 

Alone ! §86 " 192 

Winter Closes In §87 " 193 

A Crisis §88 " 194 

Back Again §89 " 195 

A Dramatic Entry § 90 " 196 

A Reverie §91 " 198 

And Then? § 92 " 199 

A Garden Dialogue §101 " 200 



?.^AR 12 1913 



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